Gr4vy’s cloud-native payment orchestration platform has been awarded ‘Best Emerging Fintech Cloud Payments Solutions Company USA’ at this year’s Fintech Awards, by Wealth and Finance International. Now in its fifth year, the awards recognize leadership and innovation in the fintech industry worldwide.

Gr4vy was selected for its benefits and features that make its platform unique and give merchants more flexibility when it comes to payment optimization and management. Gr4vy is the only cloud native, serverless infrastructure (IaaS)  with the resilience, redundancy and performance you expect from a cloud company.  With Gr4vy, merchants can expect a reduced risk of downtime, no single point of failure and linear scalability. Unlike traditional SaaS payment solutions, Gr4vy offers infrastructure that can be configured to each merchant’s bespoke needs.  Merchants are not limited to a deployment to meet most merchants, as they have their own private payment infrastructure that can be customized to fit their needs.

To read the full write-up about Gr4vy by Wealth and Finance International, click here.

Gr4vy’s infrastructure gives merchants the ability to expand and control their payment stack from anywhere through a single Universal API. The platform’s single-tenant cloud infrastructure also reduces points of failure to ensure that a merchant never loses a transaction, and can also spin up an Edge to any instance and deploy it where needed, regardless of location, to help merchants meet regional data privacy and protection regulations.

• Gr4vy’s intuitive no-code admin controls all of a retailer’s payment methods, providers, workflows and conditions. This allows any team member to contribute to the payment stack, freeing the development team to focus efforts where they’re needed most
• The no-code workflow engine puts merchants in control of every part of a transaction’s lifecycle to achieve powerful outcomes. Merchants can prioritize payment methods offered at checkout, decline transactions early, and intelligently route transactions so that payments settle faster. With the workflow engine, merchants can also reduce fraud and chargebacks, restrict the sale of prohibited goods, optimize processing fees and lessen the overall cost of transactions
• Gr4vy offers a single hub for monitoring and managing consolidated transaction reports across all a merchant’s service providers
• The platform is payment service provider agnostic. Merchants can mix and match providers, payment methods and route their transactions without being locked into a single ecosystem
• The PCI1 Certified Gr4vy Vault allows retailers to move fluidly across current and future payment service providers, storing and securing customer payment details

For an overview of Gr4vy’s platform, watch this short video, or explore the platform features and get in touch with a member of our team to learn more.

To discover more about Gr4vy’s background and why a cloud-first platform is important to consider, watch the fireside chat between Gr4vy Founder and CEO, John Lunn, and retail industry expert and founder of The Consumer First Group, Martin Newman.

People around the world are turning to digital streaming services as a way to entertain themselves and engage with others, with the average person now consuming five hours of streaming content per week. Even against the current backdrop of economic uncertainty, the market’s expansion continues, with Grand View Research expecting the now-nearly $60 billion industry to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.3% between 2022 to 2030.

One key driver of market growth is live online sports events, which are becoming increasingly popular as more international, national, and local leagues and clubs stream their matches directly into fans’ living rooms. Verified Market Research estimates that the live sports streaming segment itself will be worth $87.3 million by 2028.

For streaming service providers, however, content doesn’t always equate to conversion on the buy-side for consumers. Let’s look at how a cloud-native payment orchestration solution can boost streaming companies’ bottom lines and help them enter new and emerging markets.

Payment-related headaches

One way that streaming companies can attract new customers is by enabling them to pay for the service they want in the manner they want, whether that’s via a digital wallet, online cash application, QR code, money transfer, or cryptocurrency. For consumers, that flexibility is more important than ever: in exchange for their loyalty, they want merchants and service providers to respect their payment preferences.

The problem is, onboarding, integrating, scaling, and managing any new payment method—let alone multiple—is a challenge. First, it can be laborious for a company to negotiate with multiple payment service providers and costly to accommodate their different APIs and functionalities. Often, months of painstaking integration work are required to add a single payment type to an existing payment stack and to related payment, fulfillment, and accounting systems. Then there’s the back-end work needed to support updates and enhancements to a payment type across its lifecycle.

There’s also geographic complexity to contend with. With e-commerce knowing no bounds and open banking initiatives providing favorable trading terms, many streaming companies want to expand to new markets. However, this requires deep knowledge of a market’s unique payment landscape plus technical and linguistic skills that many do not have.

Regulation presents still more complexity. In Europe, the EU General Data Protection Regulation mandates the local storage and management of citizens’ payment data. India and Brazil boast similar regulations. Meeting these diverse requirements is a significant challenge and requires cloud-driven Edge computing capabilities that bring computation and storage closer to the sources of data.

If these factors weren’t enough, there’s also payment fragmentation based on generational preferences. Baby Boomer and Generation X consumers, for instance, like credit and debit cards. In contrast, mobile-centric Generation Z shoppers prefer digital wallets, pre-paid vouchers, and BNPL solutions. Millennials sit somewhere in the middle. In order to capture the largest potential market share, streaming companies need to have the financial and technical wherewithal to accommodate these different options.

So, how can they—and particularly those with finite resources—cope with such varied challenges?

Harnessing the cloud to solve management challenges

One solution is to use a cloud-native payment orchestration platform (POP), which facilitates payment routing and processing between multiple payment providers and unifies all the components of a transaction under a single control layer, enabling the end-to-end management and automation of payments processing. A POP can allow streaming companies to manage all their payment services and transactions in one place while dispensing with the time-consuming and costly coding and integration work involved in onboarding and supporting different payment methods.

A POP also helps keep them in compliance with local regulations governing the use and storage of citizen data by processing and storing data at the Edge.

Another advantage is that a POP allows streaming companies to work with a variety of payment providers and thus avoid being locked into proprietary APIs or a single ecosystem. The result? More payment options for consumers, which helps to optimize conversion and increase sales.

At a macro level, a POP acts as the foundation for all current and future cross-border payments, making it easier for streaming service providers to enter new markets and scale for international success.

Case study: How ELEVEN Sports is meeting customer payment expectations with Gr4vy

One streaming company that sees the value in POPs is ELEVEN, a rapidly growing broadcaster of live sports events. The 24/7 service generates tens of millions of views per month from users from over 200 countries and territories through a range of packages from free to periodic subscriptions.

ELEVEN Sports chose a cloud-native POP from Gr4vy to accommodate local customers’ preferred payment methods on its flagship ElevenSports.com platform. The company selected Gr4vy because of the platform’s advanced features and benefits, and its ability to provide quick access to multiple payment methods and providers such as PayPal with no additional coding required. By enlisting Gr4vy’s payment expertise and industry knowledge, ELEVEN Sports was able to test different payment methods in different markets in just a few clicks. The insights from these assessments have enabled ELEVEN Sports to achieve new user acquisition and global country coverage without hiring or reassigning software developers.

Read the full ELEVEN Sports case study here

While accommodating different consumer payment preferences can significantly enhance the growth prospects for a streaming service provider, they also bring the burden of integration and long-term management.

A POP, such as that from Gr4vy, leverages the power of the cloud to give users the capability to streamline and manage payment methods, services, and transactions all in one place. Its orchestration layer upgrades a company’s payment stacks to make infrastructure nimbler while its intuitive, no-code dashboard centralizes the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions. With Gr4vy, streaming companies never have to lose a transaction again.

For more information about cloud POPs and the benefits of Gr4vy, visit gr4vy.com/ 

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Global e-commerce is growing at an exponential rate, with sales on track to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025, and cross-border purchases are following suit, with 51% of global consumers saying they plan to make more. To enable these consumers to buy what they want, when they want, and how they want, merchants are increasingly onboarding cross-border payment methods such as digital wallets, QR codes, money transfers, online cash applications, buy now pay later (BNPL) services, and cryptocurrencies.

While it’s an advantage to give customers choice and flexibility in how they pay for a product or service, cross-border payment methods are notoriously difficult to onboard, integrate, scale, and manage. So, what is an ambitious merchant with finite resources to do, and what do they need to consider for e-commerce success?

Technical challenges with implementing payments

It can be hard work for a merchant to negotiate with multiple payment service providers (PSPs), and costly to accommodate their different APIs and functionalities. Often, months of painstaking integration work are required to add a single payment type to an existing payment stack and related checkout, fulfillment, and accounting systems.

Then there’s the front-end and back-end work needed to support updates and enhancements to a payment type across its lifecycle. For example, merchants need the ability to prioritize payment methods offered at checkout, decline transactions early, and intelligently route transactions, so payments settle faster. They also need to consider ways to reduce fraud and chargebacks, restrict the sale of prohibited goods, optimize processing fees and lessen the overall cost of transactions.

The complexities around regulation, geography, and generation

With e-commerce knowing no bounds and open banking initiatives providing favorable trading terms, many merchants want to expand to new markets. However, this requires deep knowledge of a market’s unique payment landscape and technical and linguistic skills many do not have.

Regulation presents even more complexity. In Europe, the EU General Data Protection Regulation mandates the local storage and management of citizens’ payment data. Countries such as India and Brazil boast similar regulations, and this regulatory minefield across the world is changing all the time. Meeting these diverse requirements is a significant challenge and requires cloud-driven Edge computing capabilities that bring computation and storage closer to the data sources.

If these factors weren’t enough, there’s also payment fragmentation based on generational preferences. Baby Boomer and Generation X consumers, for instance, like credit and debit cards. In contrast, mobile-centric Generation Z shoppers prefer digital wallets, pre-paid vouchers, and BNPL solutions, with millennials sitting somewhere in the middle. To capture the largest potential market share, merchants must have the financial and technical wherewithal to accommodate the preferences across all these demographics.

How payment orchestration can help

One solution for all the above is to use a cloud-native payment orchestration platform (POP), which facilitates payment routing and processing between multiple payment providers and unifies all transaction components under a single control layer, enabling the end-to-end management and automation of payments processing. A POP allows merchants to streamline and manage all their payment methods, services, and transactions in one place while dispensing with the time-consuming and costly coding and integration work involved in onboarding and supporting different payment methods.

A POP also helps to keep merchants in compliance with local regulations governing the use and storage of citizen data by processing and storing data at the Edge. A local edge keeps merchant and customer data in the region or country deployed, helping merchants meet data privacy protection laws while offering varying localized payment options to a specific region – making cross-border payment optionality easy.

Another advantage of a POP is that it allows merchants to work with various payment providers and thus avoid being locked into proprietary APIs or a single ecosystem. The result? More payment options at checkout, which helps optimize customer conversion and increase sales. And at a macro level, a POP acts as the foundation for all current and future cross-border payments, making it easier for merchants to enter new, regional markets and scale for international e-commerce success.

While accommodating cross-border payment methods can significantly enhance the growth prospects for a merchant, they also bring the burden of integration and long-term management. However, with the right payment orchestration platform and partner, a merchant can support cross-border payment methods quickly and enjoy all of its advantages without the burden of managing multiple payment methods.

Gr4vy’s POP leverages the power of the cloud to give users the capability to streamline and manage payment methods, services, and transactions all in one place. Its orchestration layer upgrades a company’s payment stacks to make infrastructure nimbler. While its intuitive, no-code dashboard centralizes the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions. With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again.

This article first appeared on Payments Next

Worldwide growth in various payment methods and processors has led retailers to build increasingly complex payment infrastructure. While offering payment optionality to meet customer demand and streamline the checkout experience for customers is crucial, it’s not without pain points.

Hurdles exist like technical debt, adding and negotiating new payment methods, keeping customer data secure and more. Retailers across the world are already battling with challenges around supply chain, sustainability, talent retention, the rising cost of living and its impact on consumer spending, and wider digitization. As merchants work to overcome these broader challenges, payment orchestration can help overcome payment-related woes so merchants can continue to scale.

Implementing payment methods easily 

Depending on the geographical footprint of a merchant’s customer base, there could be more than 200 payment methods and just as many payment processors and currencies worldwide of consideration. Of course, the majority of merchants are focused on a handful of markets, but even implementing one new payment connection in a single market can be difficult and costly.

Data from Barclaycard, a UK-based credit card provider, has shown that two in five (37%) of online businesses have not introduced any new payments technology on their website over the past two years. There are also many internal projects competing for prioritization over a payments expansion strategy, negatively impacting user growth and revenue for merchants as they seek to further digitize across their operations.

In addition to competing priorities, internal development teams face a growing issue of global talent shortage, with software engineers and developers in increasing demand. For merchants adding payment methods with internal teams, this can mean increasing resources and hiring large software teams, with implementation taking anywhere from months to years to complete.

Payment orchestration platforms (POPs) offer retailers the option to add new payment methods and providers in just a few clicks with little to no code required. A cloud-native provider is essential for merchants focused on flexibility and scale as they digitize.

Cloud-native POPs can offer merchants their own dedicated instances in the cloud, meaning they won’t share server loads with other merchants. These instances become their own individualized payments infrastructure, with the ability to deploy in any region or country with a local edge, helping them comply with local regulations and solving latency issues when trying to pass transaction data across large distances.

Tokenize across multiple processors with one provider 

Tokenization protects sensitive payment data by replacing it with unique identification data. Many merchants operating online will use the tokenization service provided by their selected payment gateway provider. However, for those that would like to add more payment providers to their stack, each gateway provider has its own unique token schema, locking the merchant in and forcing the merchant to undertake a costly and time-consuming process of de-tokenizing data and moving that data to a new processing gateway if they want to switch providers.

For greater provider flexibility, POPs can offer a provider-agnostic vault, creating a unique individual token that can be used across any payment service provider (PSP) or acquirer in the system, giving a merchant full control over routing and the ability to optimize payment flow.

POPs allow retailers to use payments as a strategic advantage. The platform a retailer chooses should optimize conversion rates at a cart level and at checkout, as well as advise and recommend how to increase sales and decrease costs as a retailer’s business grows and expands. Cloud-native POPs can replace legacy payment infrastructures and systems and streamline and manage payment methods, services and transactions in one place.

Gr4vy’s POP leverages the power of the cloud to give users the capability to streamline and manage payment methods, services, and transactions all in one place. Its orchestration layer upgrades a company’s payment stacks to make infrastructure nimbler. While its intuitive, no-code dashboard centralizes the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions. With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again. For more information, please visit gr4vy.com/.

This article first appeared on Retail TouchPoints

Analysts earmarked 2021 as the year of transition for payments. Companies across various sectors sought stability and growth in a post-lockdown world, as they overcame the challenges they faced with the speed of digital transformation catalyzed by COVID-19 the previous year.

The payment sector was not immune to challenges either. Although fintech is one of the largest funded categories of technology globally, receiving $98 billion in investment in the first half of 2021 alone, and representing 18% of all capital invested in 2021, exponential growth and demand from consumers and retailers alike caused many hurdles.

From the growth of newer payment methods, such as Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), leading to increased crackdown from regulators worldwide, to mass skill shortages within the fintech sector as it seeks to meet both existing demand and continued innovation, it begs the question of what might come in 2022.

If 2021 was the year of transition and stabilization, could 2022 be the year of acceleration? Here are five predictions for the year ahead.

1.The rise of tokenization

Data security will continue to be a struggle for the payments and fintech industries. As a result, we’ll see the further rise of tokenization and tokens to replace sensitive data with a non-sensitive digital equivalent to keep consumer data secure.

Companies like Visa, Mastercard and Amex will continue to utilize tokenization as a means to protect credit card information. There are also rumors of interchange rate savings for banks, but there could be savings for those who start to use Visa and Mastercards network tokenization products.

However, it won’t be a one size fits all proposition. Payment orchestration platforms (POPs) that allow for tokenization and are PCI compliant will be crucial. Retailers and merchants will use these platforms to circumvent having to tokenize through just one payment service provider. Instead, they will opt for payment orchestration platforms that allow them to tokenize in many different places and provide a better user experience.

2. Open Banking will accelerate in 2022

Interchange rates will increase in 2022. As a result, merchants will face higher costs to accept credit card payments. We’re already seeing interchange rates affect the fintech and payments industry with news of fee increases being scrutinized by the UK government’s Treasury Select Committee which found “no evidence to justify the rises.”

Before, with Open Banking, there was a problem with the user experience, but now the technology and companies offering it have caught up. Payment orchestration platforms have also made it easy to implement and provide open banking options at checkout, so merchants have a strong reason to offer it as a payment option.

To that end, Open Banking will continue to be a hot topic in the year ahead. And, for merchants, it will be more lucrative with no chargebacks while allowing customers to pay directly from a bank account. Open Banking will serve a whole population of underserved customers who may not have access to a credit card. And when combined with payment orchestration, it will provide a better retail checkout experience.

3. Cloud-native solutions will help retailers stay competitive

Digitalization or moving to the Cloud has accelerated during COVID-19, driven not only by the considerable growth in online shopping but also by the ability of in-house teams to run infrastructure when working from home.

This shift toward cloud-hosted solutions and headless commerce will continue its momentum. When coupled with the massive skills gap developing due to the lack of cloud engineers, you see the increasing need for no-code solutions that are cloud-native.

2022 will be the year of headless commerce backed by no/low code backends that will allow today’s retailers to scale and innovate at the speed they need to in order to remain competitive.

4. Alternative payment methods will gain prominence in 2022

Mastercard research showed 93% of consumers internationally are considering using at least one emerging payment method, such as cryptocurrency, biometrics, or QR code in the next year, leading to merchants taking increased consideration of the payment methods being offered at the checkout. 2022 will be the year bank-to-bank payments, wallets and other payment types rise to prominence. Credit cards’ share of checkout will continue to decline at an accelerating pace driven by increases in interchange rates, as well as consumer preference with millennial and Gen Z consumers. 

5. Payments are getting more complicated – it’s time retailers take note

A big trend in 2022 will be around embedded banking or embedded finance. For example, being able to embed credit card applications and creating checking accounts within other third-party apps.

Consumers, however, are expecting more, and the landscape is becoming increasingly complex. It used to be the case that merchants could offer just one or two payment methods at checkout, such as credit card payments. With the rise of automated clearing house (ACH) payments, wallets, Buy Now Pay Later, and more, customers are demanding alternative ways to pay and greater flexibility.

Retailers will need to shift in 2022 and offer various payment options and experiences at checkout. As a solution, I expect we’ll see payment orchestration take center stage with retailers adopting payment orchestration platforms that are no-to-low low code to add new payment methods quickly. Alternatively, merchants will be able to utilize the ability to offer greater payment options at checkout as a marketing tool while also increasing customer loyalty by delivering customers the payment options they desire.

6. Buy Now Pay Later isn’t going anywhere but differentiation will be key

Buy Now Pay Later will continue to be an ongoing topic in 2022. However, I anticipate seeing more consolidation in the space and BNPL companies moving towards their next trick.

Companies that started as a BNPL company will look to expand and differentiate themselves, possibly becoming a banking platform or a marketing platform. To further differentiate, we’ll see BNPL providers also come in with new and different models.

For retailers, that means observing these companies carefully, as tribalism is a trend amongst consumers, with many only using one BNPL provider. Retailers will need to utilize payment orchestration and platforms to not lock themselves into working with one provider but instead utilize one platform to gain access to a variety of payment options regardless of the provider.

If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected and to adapt quickly. But one thing is for certain, and that’s innovation. We can look forward to the expansion of infrastructural changes, such as Open Banking, and the benefits that will bring to the sector, as well as new and exciting opportunities in payments for merchants and consumers.

Worldwide growth in payment methods and processors has led merchants to build complex payment infrastructure that requires dedicated in-house payment teams. This approach, however, incurs technical debt, inflexibility and potential regulatory challenges.

Interestingly, payment orchestration is not a new idea, but what is different is the accelerated drive toward digital transformation and the advantages of cloud computing. Surprisingly, every company that sells online is building or has built the same piece of payment software. Software that’s nowhere near good enough for true digital transformation nor allows merchants to expand and control their payment stack from anywhere.

It’s time payment orchestration got an upgrade to serve customers’ needs. By combining the power of payment platforms with the cloud, merchants can gain a genuinely modern payment infrastructure to deliver multiple payment options consumers demand, regardless of location.

Understand the evolution of payments

Early in the days of internet payments, we used dial-up modems that dialed into banks to make payments and adapt the Point of Sale infrastructure that already existed to work online. Mainframe solutions, data centers and archaic network protocols necessitated payment companies to run data centers and payment gateways existing as literal gateways with physical addresses and plenty of hardware. Merchants who worked with this pre-cloud infrastructure had to make significant investments in hardware to accept money.

Following this came more internet-friendly API-type solutions using back-end languages, such as C and Java. These allowed a merchant’s internet-facing front end to route payments through a back-end server to internet-enabled gateways using IP and APIs or SDKs. However, when done poorly, many consumer payment details were held unencrypted in storage and databases, leading to enough breaches that the card associations stepped in and mandated PCI certification for companies holding this kind of data. This action increased the cost of maintaining a payment system, so much so that small merchants found it out of reach.

The industry reacted, and a hosted payment page became a common way to integrate along with solutions such as PayPal. This further evolved to frames, pop-ups and even hosted fields. As time has gone on, the complexity of these systems has required merchants to choose; invest in internal infrastructure to manage how different payment options interact with the rest of operations or don’t accept various payment methods and lose potential customers.

Take payments to the cloud

The boom in fintech has massively increased the variety of ways to pay, and not offering customers their preferred ways to pay has shown they are more likely to abandon a cart. Unsurprisingly, it’s a complex problem, but not one that merchants can’t overcome by eliminating the need for large payments teams and taking payments and payment orchestration to the cloud.

To build scalable cloud-native payment infrastructure, you need to add a layer that can orchestrate and standardize all the payment methods that consumers require in a way that utilizes the benefits of cloud computing without taking on the burden of PCI compliance. Your server-less functions should remain dormant until a consumer needs that payment method. Unified reporting should be replicable and available wherever your accounting team sits – home or otherwise – and Edge computing should push user experiences closer to customers and their specific needs.

The advantage of being able to scale your payment infrastructure up and down based on peaks and valleys in your annual sales cycles is a huge benefit of a cloud-native payment orchestration platform. Moreover, it offers significant savings that can increase your bottom line.

‘Go Data-Centric’ and ‘Get Regulatory Compliant Privacy’ concerns have increased around the world. Data breaches continue to rise, leaving customers skeptical of how their data is held, with governments reacting in turn to protect their citizens. Several countries have blocks and set rules on what and where data can be kept on their citizens.

We can already see examples. In India, the Reserve bank has set explicit rules around transactional data like card numbers and bank details and how they may not leave the country and must reside in local storage. European GDPR rules are another example, and the fallout from the collapse of the Privacy Shield regulation means that if a US Customer Service agent looks at customer data, then there is a breach of privacy even if that data is held locally. The problem is that most payment companies and solutions are not built to be distributed, and breaking a monolithic stack into parts is a challenging task for a payment processor and a merchant.

To become future-proof and ready to deal with the rapidly changing regulations, merchants need to start looking towards the benefits of Edge computing, which can keep data local while still allowing access to locally regulated payment companies and types.

Tokenize for the future

One way to keep yourself PCI compliant as a merchant is to tokenize your customers’ payments details at the payment service provider (PSP) level or to go deeper at the association level. Either way, there is a future where you, as a merchant, will need to store and interact with multiple tokens per customer.

For example, you could have a situation where for customer X, you need to use token Y on processor Z.  However, if customer X is using another of your brands or is on mobile or in-store, then customer X will have to use token A on processor B.

Managing these tokens and keeping them up to date in a controllable fashion is soon to become a major headache for all merchants. It’s essential to develop a strategy for doing this now, particularly with network tokens, as it can create cost savings if done correctly. Of course, whatever you use to manage this needs to be cloud native and potentially Edge ready to keep you locally compliant.

As payments move to the cloud, don’t be afraid to modernize your payment infrastructure, take on digital transformation and go global. Look to build or buy cloud native payment orchestration that takes advantage of the benefits of cloud technology, such as auto-scaling, Edge computing for local compliance and cloud-based self-updating vaulting technology. With this foundation, you will be able to take on whatever the future holds.

Gr4vy’s POP leverages the power of the cloud to give users the capability to streamline and manage payment methods, services, and transactions all in one place. Its orchestration layer upgrades a company’s payment stacks to make infrastructure nimbler. While its intuitive, no-code dashboard centralizes the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions. With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again. For more information, please visit gr4vy.com/.

This article first appeared on PaymentsJournal

As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, retailers are looking for ways to rebound and capitalize on pent-up demand for products and services.

With more people opting to shop online than ever before, an obvious place to start is to make it easier for customers to buy. Unfortunately for retailers, the complexity involved in onboarding and managing multiple, emerging forms of payment is daunting at best, prohibitive at worst.

Supporting preferred payment methods during checkout, however, is critical for retailers to deliver the personalized, frictionless and expedient e-commerce experiences customers crave. Let’s explore what retailers need to know.

The Practical Challenges of Payments

At a macro level, the market is evolving fast. The growth of e-commerce has decreased reliance on cash, and there’s increased penetration of mobile devices and government encouragement of digital economies. Plus, COVID-19 has driven a sea change in consumer behavior.

These developments have given rise to a host of new payment types. Among them are digital wallets, online cash applications, buy now pay later (BNPL) solutions, QR code payments, money transfers, instalment payments, and cryptocurrencies.

For retailers, these new payment types present both an opportunity and a challenge. While it’s an advantage to give customers a choice in how they pay for a product or service, it can be laborious to negotiate with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) as well as time consuming and costly to accommodate their different APIs and functionalities.

Consider the Geographic Complexity

With e-commerce knowing no boundaries and open banking initiatives providing favorable trading terms, many retailers want to expand to new markets. However, that requires deep, localized knowledge and technical and linguistic skills that many don’t have. That’s because every country worldwide has a unique payment landscape shaped by history, socioeconomics, culture and government regulation.

In India, Indonesia, and Mexico, for example, many citizens are underbanked. They have to rely on alternative financial services such as money orders, check-cashing services and payday loans to manage finances and fund purchases.

Similarly, underdeveloped countries whose financial systems lack basic payment processing capabilities have developed their own mobile payment solutions to compensate. Countries such as China, Germany, the United States and more have also pioneered a raft of mobile payment options. Simply put, payment methods today are often country-specific and won’t necessarily work everywhere.

Don’t Forget Compliance and Regulation

In Europe, the EU General Data Protection Regulation mandates the local storage and management of citizens’ payment data. India and Brazil boast similar regulations. Meeting these diverse requirements is a significant challenge and requires cloud-driven Edge computing capabilities that bring computation and storage closer to the sources of data.

Adding a new local payment type isn’t as simple as just turning it on. Retailers entering a new market need to ensure they comply with local regulations governing the use and storage of citizen data. The risk of noncompliance, as some unwitting payment companies and networks have found, is sizeable fines.

Cloud Technology is the Future

Amidst all these challenges, there’s good news. There is now a way for retailers to quickly and efficiently onboard and scale new payment types without lengthy lead times, localized knowledge, or costly development resources. Cloud-native payment orchestration platforms (POPs) have emerged that replace legacy payment infrastructures and systems and streamline and manage payment methods, services and transactions in one place.

Cloud POPs enable businesses to seamlessly and compliantly introduce local payment methods as soon as they enter the region or country. With a cloud-based POP, retailers get their own Instances, which become a retailer’s individualized infrastructure and payment platform in the Cloud. They can then take these Instances, and thanks to cloud computing, spin up an Edge to their Instance in any region. These Edges provide significant benefits, ensuring retailers can offer local payment methods that meet regulation, keep customers’ data secure within the country while still offering the payment methods consumers demand. As a result, retailers can build satisfaction and loyalty by supporting customers’ preferred payment methods at the outset.

Yes, retailers face multiple challenges when setting themselves up to accommodate today’s payment methods. What they need is a cloud-native POP solution that can integrate and manage all payment forms in one place and facilitate entry into new markets virtually at the click of a button.

If you’re growing globally and want to test new payment methods in local markets without hiring a team of engineers, check out the Gr4vy platform.

This article first appeared on TotalRetail

Why is payment orchestration suddenly getting so much attention? The truth is, it’s not a new idea, but what is different is the accelerated drive toward digital transformation and the advantages of cloud computing.

Payment orchestration is no longer optional. Before COVID-19, retailers had options. Digital transformation was back of mind, but it wasn’t a top priority. Retailers knew 15% of their business was digital, and their ecommerce channel was growing. However, it was the other 85% of the business that had a retailer’s attention.

Then the pandemic happened, and everything changed: 15% of a retailer’s business quickly became 90% to 100% of the business. The global supply chain fractured. People turned to online shopping in droves. A retailer’s digital ecommerce channel suddenly became critical for growth. Today, the companies that are thriving are the ones that changed and adapted.

Surprisingly, how retailers manage and handle payments has not changed; it’s decisively stuck 20 years in the past. To ultimately transform, retailers need flexible, scalable and customizable payment infrastructure.

A No-Win Payments Scenario

Astoundingly, every company that sells online is building or has built exactly the same piece of payment software, software that is just enough but nowhere near good enough for true digital transformation. This software is generically called “payment orchestration.” Why? Because it routes clients’ payments to wherever it needs to go.

It starts simply. Retailers want to sell online, so they sign up with a Payment Service Provider (PSP) that processes credit cards. Their developer integrates them into the company site. The realization then hits that new payment methods are required, such as PayPal or Apple Pay. Then local, regional and global payment methods come into play. The retailer, for example, wants to launch into Germany or expand to Asia where customers prefer not to pay with credit cards and want to pay after delivery, do direct debits or pay in installments.

The retailer’s PSP doesn’t do any of this, so they have to find a new or additional PSP. All integrations then become the mandate of the retailer to add to the payment roadmap. Meanwhile, the payment team is frustrated, accounting can’t scale efficiently under the demand to reconcile reports, and the retailer’s developer can’t stick everything together.

Furthermore, the retailer wants to move from a shopping cart solution installed on a server in a data center to a cloud-based solution. Still, they need both systems, as some legacy processes have to run on their hardware. The result? Retailers end up with a compromise solution, full of workarounds, long lead times, excessive maintenance costs and legacy hosting costs.

What’s the solution?

1) The Cloud is the Future

The future of technology is in the cloud. Retailers need a payment orchestration platform that works both today and wherever digital commerce takes them in the future. Shopping carts are going headless and cloud-based, as are stock control, shipping and even warehousing solutions. In the not too distant future, retailers won’t own a single server. Retailers can’t repeat past mistakes with an orchestration platform that locks them into a single provider with a single point of failure. PSPs have highly scalable redundant platforms; bolting a single point of failure on top introduces unnecessary risk. To take on digital transformation, retailers need to choose a platform that works now, will work with their infrastructure in the future, and functions wherever and however it’s deployed.

2) Simplify Compliance and Regulation

Retailers must prepare for compliance and regulation. Adding a local payment method is not as simple as just turning it on. Being able to operate in certain countries entails a load of local and regional compliance requirements around what retailers do and how data is stored. For any retailer with international e-commerce, this is getting harder — with countries and regions setting local rules and regulations that are far more stringent than what most retailers have deployed. When selecting a payment orchestration platform retailers must make sure it keeps them in local compliance, is cloud based and can process data on the edge.

3) Nimbleness Matters

Retailers need to be nimble. The world of payments is getting more complex. New, exciting payment methods have arisen such as wallets, installment payments and QR code checkouts, and there’s more on the way. For example, Open Banking in Europe has been slow in adoption due to implementation complexity. However, its adoption will increase due to rising interchange rates and benefit retailers with free and chargeback-resistant payments.

A retailer’s platform must enable them to pick, test and deploy these new payment types quickly and simply, with a no-code interface and no need for developers to be involved. Deploying these new payment types will cause very little friction to backend accounts and fulfillment teams. A cloud-based payment solution will unify reporting, irrespective of payment type.

4) Scale for Simplicity

Retailers need to select a payment orchestration platform that makes things simpler and then gets out of the way. Imagine being free from the burden of an annual PCI audit. Retailers must choose a platform that holds payment data and won’t lock them into a proprietary tokenization system. They need to select a solution that maintains their payment providers, changes in reporting, and updates security protocols. Basically, retailers need an “integrate once and don’t worry about it again” platform.

5) Identify Growth Opportunities

Payments experts are in short supply. Retailers need a platform that offers support. Retailers are leaving business on the table by not supporting customers’ preferred ways to pay. The platform a retailer chooses should optimize conversion rates at a cart level and at checkout. The right platform advises and recommends how to increase sales and decrease costs as a retailer’s business grows and expands.

So why is now the time for payment orchestration? Retailers needed it before, but now they can’t win without it. Retailers must choose a solution that turns payments into a strategic advantage and enables digital transformation with ease.

Gr4vy’s POP leverages the power of the cloud to give users the capability to streamline and manage payment methods, services, and transactions all in one place. Its orchestration layer upgrades a company’s payment stacks to make infrastructure nimbler. While its intuitive, no-code dashboard centralizes the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions. With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again.

For more information, please visit gr4vy.com/

This article first appeared on Retail TouchPoints