Last month, the Federal Reserve finalized a rule that will take effect in July 2023, stating that more than one debit card network be available for routing all transactions – including ‘card not present’ transactions, such as those made online.

The Fed proposed a clarification to the rule in 2021 because it found that competing networks were not made available for routing debit card transactions, despite a 2011 ruling requiring this to be the case. It has suggested that this latest ruling will encourage competition between networks and incentivize them to improve their fraud prevention capabilities.

So, what does this mean for your business?

Debit card routing explained

Debit cards continue to be a popular form of payment for the majority of the world, gaining increasing preference amongst US consumers. From an infrastructure perspective, the core difference between debit and credit is that debit cards pull funds from a checking account, whereas credit cards make use of a line of credit.

Debit cards differ from credit cards in that they have typically been provided by issuers to process “single message” transactions, and the transaction will be settled immediately after authorization. Credit cards, however, have a “dual message” system in place wherein a transaction must be authorized first, which then allows for settlement of the funds.

Historically, debit cards have been issued for single-message processing because they were used with a personal identity number (PIN) for in-store ‘card present’ environments. This has meant debit card transactions and the local debit card networks such as Star, NYCE, and PULSE, have not been able to keep up with global card schemes. However, the shift to online shopping has led to the rise of ‘PIN-less’ debit transactions, and local debit networks have created the functionality to transact without the need for PIN verification to compete with global card schemes for e-commerce transactions.

The background to ‘no network exclusivity’

In 2011, the US Government enacted an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which offers merchants the possibility to route debit card transactions via at least two unaffiliated networks. The ‘Durbin Amendment’ mandates all issuers to issue debit cards with at least two networks, allowing the merchant to choose the network of their preference for routing transactions.

The reason this amendment was put into place was because the global card schemes dominated the debit network market and, as such, were able to charge merchants higher prices than the local debit networks. Preferential pricing and incentives to issuers led the global card schemes to lock in their position in the market, meaning merchants had no choice but to route transactions over the more expensive global networks.

The `No Network Exclusivity` clause in the Durbin Amendment consequently enabled merchants to pay lower costs as it forces issuers to enable lower cost rails to route debit traffic over. Before the Durbin Amendment, merchants had almost no choice but to pay the higher fees to the global networks, and it is calculated that by allowing merchants the choice to route between networks they can save up to 20% to 30% on interchange and scheme fees.

Aside from routing limitations, it would also seem that not all issuers have enabled PIN-less capabilities on all debit card ranges, which is seen as a violation of the Durbin Amendment, as the inability to use PIN-less functionality on ‘card not present’ transactions meant merchants were forced to process transactions via the global card networks.

A decade later, this has led to the new ruling by the Federal Reserve, outlined above.

What does the Federal Reserve ruling mean for merchants?

Due to the complexities involved, many merchants are not reaping the benefits of the regulation yet. Determining whether a card can be sent as a PIN-less debit into a local debit network, or if a card has been issued as dual-branded or not can add an additional admin headache for merchants.

Payment orchestration platforms (POPs), such as Gr4vy, aim to remove this complexity and offer the functionality needed by merchants to significantly increase conversion rates, while lowering costs : win win for your bottom line.

POPs can help merchants in the following ways:

• BIN table – A sophisticated bank identification number (BIN) table is able to determine which network a debit card is issued, allowing a merchant to easily display the available card networks to the buyer on the front-end, while at the same time, instructing the payment service provider(s) (PSP) to route the transaction accordingly to the preferred acquirer
• Vault – Centralized vaults offered by POPs can store the card details to be re-used by the merchant in billing sequences, allowing the same routing capabilities for later use
• Automatic retry functionality – Automatic retry functionality can enable merchants to automate retry policies for declined transactions over different networks. For example, if a transaction using a local card network is declined, it’s possible to retry it over a global card network. Beyond that, it is also possible to retry a transaction through different acquirers
• Transaction routing and network tokenization – Sophisticated routing mechanisms using EMVCo’s network token functionality allows POPs, such as Gr4vy, to obtain the highest conversion uplift for merchants with the lowest cost routing. By provisioning network tokens for cards issued with major card schemes via a POP, merchants can benefit from higher authorization rates and lower chargeback rates as tokenized cards have a lower price point for interchange rates by global card schemes. By combining the routing capabilities for debit networks over local rails, and provisioning network tokens for global rails, this allow for maximum cost saving as well as highest conversion rates

Gr4vy takes away the complexity for the merchant by automating the usage of the correct payment instrument (PAN + CVV for local debit network, and Network Token + Cryptogram for global acquiring rails) with the correct network, included in Gr4vy’s automated retry mechanism.

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.

Take a look at Gr4vy’s platform, used by merchants across the world, and get in touch with a member of our team today.

Global online retail sales are set to exceed seven trillion U.S. dollars by 2025. Yet today’s merchants may struggle to capitalize on this as nearly 1 out of 5 shoppers abandon cart due to a long or complicated checkout process. That, combined with the fact that many merchants have not updated their payments systems in the past two years, leads to an inability to optimize the customer checkout or orchestrate payments, leading to low conversion rates.

Merchants with a global footprint are aware that each customer has their own preferred payment method, and many will abandon a transaction and head elsewhere if they meet too much friction at the checkout. According to research from GoCardless, across all payment methods globally, the top three reasons consumers choose their preferred payment method are: easiest to use (56%), payment will be taken automatically (42%), and that their payment method is commonly accepted by most or all of the businesses from which the consumer makes a purchase (35%).

The checkout: The make or break stage of transactions

Payment orchestration platforms (POPs) are known for their ability to assist merchants with improving the checkout experience at the back-end. Merchants can introduce increased payment optionality to cater to ever-evolving customer payment preferences and stay compliant to a range of data and regulatory requirements in local markets without eating into engineering and technology resources.

For merchants without a POP, relying on a single payment provider or juggling multiple providers that are not integrated with each other can be an easily avoided headache. An orchestration layer – whether it is outsourced or built in-house – optimizes payment processing at each stage of the payment flow for online transactions, minimizing the number of failed transactions due to technical issues and allowing merchants to save costs.

Download the free whitepaper, ‘Cracking open the payments orchestration layer’ from Retail Payments Global Consultancy Group (RPGC) to read about developing a POP in-house from scratch, or download Gr4vy’s eGuide, IaaS vs. SaaS: A merchant’s guide to payment orchestration, for more.

Preferred payment orchestration platforms to the front

In addition to back-end orchestration which covers transaction routing to optimize for a variety of outcomes, including fraud prevention and authorization rates, among others, POPs can also orchestrate the front-end checkout experience. That is, everything a merchant’s customer sees throughout their experience with the checkout, offering a merchant the ability to dynamically filter and order payment methods offered to individual customers at the checkout based on the content of a shopping cart or preferences based on previous transactions.

For example, if a merchant is working with a payment processor through a payment orchestration platform that prohibits the purchase of certain products, such as alcohol and tobacco, metadata about the contents of the shopping cart can be passed to the POP who can ‘hide’ that specific processor from the customer at the checkout and push an alternative method forward, keeping both merchant and processors happy and compliant.

Likewise, if a customer has expensive electronic products in their cart, they might be a good candidate for alternative payment methods such as ‘buy now, pay later’ or open banking, so a merchant can set a rule based on transaction value (for example, $1,000+) to offer a provider for that method, such as Klarna, Trustly or Vyne, as “first” in the order of payment methods displayed to the consumer.

No two customers are alike and not all POPs are created equal

With an orchestration layer or platform that optimizes both the front- and back-end, merchants can create a checkout experience that will delight their customers. Positioning semi-personalized payment methods depending on purchases in front of consumers, in addition to plenty of options for the consumer to select depending on their preferences, can be as easy as one click.

In addition, the recent federal reserve debit card regulation will allow merchants in the US to benefit from increased conversion rates, lowering risk, and lower processing costs. Using orchestration allows merchants to take immediate advantage of cost based routing and optimize over time with intelligent data insights with zero costs and time to deliver to their organization.

With an orchestration layer or platform that optimizes both the front- and back-end, merchants can create a checkout experience that will delight their customers. Positioning semi-personalized payment methods depending on purchases in front of consumers, in addition to plenty of options for the consumer to select depending on their preferences, can be as easy as one click.

This article first appeared on Digital Transactions

The gaming industry has always gone hand in hand with cutting edge technology, often being at the forefront of industries willing to incorporate and make regular use of them as soon as possible.

And just as gaming was one of the industries to first widely utilise the internet to allow players to compete and interact with each other online, so too is gaming one of the main industries pioneering the next stages of emerging technologies: web3, the Metaverse, NFT’s and blockchain technology like Bitcoin.

Although a lot of these technologies have had bumpy starts to their lives, with NFTs sometimes rapidly depreciating in value and processes like Bitcoin mining being seen as environmentally damaging, their future earning potential is widely considered to be pretty much set in stone.

According to investment groups, the Metaverse could be worth up to $13 trillion by 2030, so although it’s not catching fire just yet, a lot of big businesses plan to take the leap to a more virtual world, complete with NFTs and blockchain payments, very seriously.

Of course, those within the gaming industry are at the forefront of that, with 48% of gaming executives believing the Metaverse creates new opportunities for business models, and 50% of them prioritising investments in virtual, augmented (AR) or mixed-reality experiences.

And it’s not just the business side of gaming that is welcoming this new tech into their lives, with 57% of gamers being interested in earning NFTs through gaming, and 45% of them saying they would invest even more into games if they could earn NFTs through playing.

With all of this excitement over the next evolution in technology, it’s important for merchants to get the right payment system to not only make sure transactions are as frictionless as possible for the consumer (especially across a global environment) but also as smooth and stress free for the merchant to set up and run.

Working with a cloud-based payment orchestration platform (POP) allows a gaming merchant to easily implement a global payment system with little to no coding required, that works seamlessly across international borders and ultimately allows them to focus on more important matters, like leading innovation.

With Gr4vy’s POP, you can have direct contact with payment service providers anywhere around the world, freeing up time and energy to devote to more complex work. Not only that but the merchant controls all payment data on the companies own terms, within a PCl1 certified agnostic vault.

And all of this can be done anywhere in the world, reached by any consumer in the world, complying with any and all local data regulations, through Gr4vy’s established cloud instances and Edge computing.

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 centralises the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions.

If you’re interested in learning more, download our free eGuide for how gaming companies can make the most of payment orchestration platforms

With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again.

In terms of profitable industries, none has had a more meteoric rise than gaming in the last few decades. All over the world spending on gaming is accelerating, due in large part to the affordability and accessibility of modern gaming technology and the widespread speed and reach of modern internet services. In the last seven years, the amount of gamers globally has risen from under two billion (1.99) in 2015 to just under three billion (2.95) in 2022, an increase of 5.6% year on year.

That, combined with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked a huge rise in micro-transactions, and digital game revenue (like cloud gaming services or even just downloadable content).

Download our free eGuide for how gaming companies can make the most of payment orchestration platforms

With so many millions of people now regularly paying for gaming services online, and a global annual market worth of around $159.3 billion, it’s no wonder that there’s now starting to be an increased focus from governments on online payment regulations and gaming transactions generally, and increased demand for fintech that works smoothly across borders.

Not only that, but merchants also have to deal with privacy and data protection laws, which can differ quite dramatically from country to county, let alone across continents. But with the rise of Edge computing and cloud-native payment orchestration platforms (POPs), as a merchant you can be locally compliant to regulations and still offer a wide array of global payment solutions like Bitcoin wallets, QR Codes and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) with little to no coding requirements.

There are multiple benefits to the use of POPs. Firstly, retailers are given their own instance in the cloud, meaning they don’t share bandwidth with anyone else. These instances also have their own individualised infrastructure, so they can be placed in any continent or country with the use of local Edge computing. This means they comply with local regulations while also making transactions as snappy across large distances and multiple borders as they are domestically.

With the increase in data breaches, it’s not just consumer confidence that is being affected. Governments are also beginning to take notice, and impose stricter regulations on how, where and when companies can store customer data. This is where POPs can work in conjunction with Edge computing to provide payment solutions that have customer data stored locally, and therefore compliant with local privacy and data laws, while also able to be easily used across multiple continents and countries, as well as being standardised across the world.

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 centralises the integration and administration of payment methods, providers, conditions, and transactions.

With Gr4vy, you never have to lose a transaction again.

The gaming industry boomed throughout the pandemic as lockdowns sparked a new or growing interest in indoor hobbies. While growth can mean a healthier bottom line, it also means gaming merchants are facing a more complex network of customers – each with their own payment preferences and needs.

How gaming merchants manage and handle payments hasn’t changed much over the years. To meet the demands that come with growth, gaming merchants need flexible, scalable, and customizable payment infrastructure.

Level One: Payment orchestration

Payment orchestration is by no means a new concept, but, much like the rest of the technology sector, there is an accelerated drive towards digital transformation and the cloud. But why do merchants need payment orchestration?

It starts simply – merchants want to sell online, so they sign-up with a payment service provider (PSP) that processes credit/debit card payments, and the merchant’s in-house developer team integrates that into their company site. Now, if a merchant wants to add new payment methods, such as PayPal or Apple Pay, or it wants to expand into new regions where customers may prefer to pay with specific methods and providers (and a host of extra local regulation and compliance on top of that), the merchant is facing a real headache.

The gaming merchant’s current PSP doesn’t offer any of this so they have to find a new or additional PSP. All integrations then become the mandate of the merchant to add to the roadmap – meanwhile, the payments team is frustrated and the developers are having to invest a large amount of time sticking everything together. The result? Merchants end up with a compromise solution, full of workarounds, long lead times, and excessive maintenance and legacy hosting costs.

So how can payment orchestration help? And what should they be looking for in a platform?

Choose your player – the traits of an ideal payment orchestration platform

1) The cloud is the future

The future of technology is in the cloud. Gaming merchants need a payment orchestration platform that works both today and wherever the future takes them. Partnering with an orchestration platform that locks merchants into a single provider with a single point-of-failure can be recipe for disaster down the line. PSPs have highly scalable redundant platforms; bolting a single point of failure on top introduces unnecessary risk. To take on digital transformation, gaming merchants 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

With global growth and continued scrutiny on consumer protection, gaming merchants 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 merchants have deployed. When selecting a payment orchestration platform, gaming merchants must make sure it keeps them in local compliance, is cloud-based and can process data on the edge.

3) Nimbleness matters

Like in-game characters, gaming merchants need to be nimble. The world of payments is getting more complex. Newer payment methods have arisen such as wallets, instalment 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 gaming merchants with free and chargeback-resistant payments.

A merchant’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 fulfilment teams. A cloud-based payment solution will unify reporting, irrespective of payment type.

4) Scale for simplicity

Gaming merchants 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. Merchants must choose a platform that holds payment data and won’t lock them into a proprietary tokenization system, not allowing for data portability. They need to select a solution that maintains their payment providers, changes in reporting, and updates security protocols. Basically, gaming merchants need an “integrate once and don’t worry about it again” platform.

5) Identify growth opportunities

Payments experts are in short supply. Gaming merchants need a platform that offers support. Merchants are leaving business on the table by not supporting customers’ preferred ways to pay. The platform a merchant 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 merchant’s business grows and expands.

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

Download our free eGuide for how gaming companies can make the most of payment orchestration platforms

The Final Boss: Gr4vy’s cloud-native payment orchestration platform

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.

Designed with advanced capabilities and benefits, Gr4vy’s service agnostic and universal capabilities across PCI-level 1 payment credential vaulting, 3D Secure, tokenization, Apple Pay, Google Pay and more ensures that merchants always have the flexibility they need across their payments stack.

Unlike other POPs, Gr4vy makes it easy to move between service providers seamlessly with just a few clicks. And Gr4vy’s no-code infrastructure enables merchants to orchestrate payments and risk management services across multiple providers — making it easy to deploy, test and learn what services work best for their business and scale.

For more information, please visit gr4vy.com/

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.

Last year, global e-commerce sales amounted to almost $5 trillion USD, and this figure is expected to grow by 50% by 2025 to $7.4 trillion USD. As e-commerce continues to boom, merchants today face challenges with their payment stack that may well look and feel like the apocalypse.

As more and more payment methods are launched and loved by consumers, it’s easy for merchants to assume that adding a new method of payment is easy. However, they are faced with multiple challenges that can be catastrophic to the bottom line if they aren’t careful. From broken supply chains to inflation, and ever-shifting consumer behavior to legacy systems where merchants haven’t touched their payment systems in two or more years, it’s a tough road to navigate.

In the beginning, there was… legacy payment infrastructure

Almost every industry has faced an ongoing battle of upgrading their systems over the past decade or so. With rapid growth and multiple rounds of mergers and acquisitions, many businesses have been left with a “spaghetti system” of providers and suppliers – whether they have been inherited, or are simply the result of patchwork fixes over the years.

Global growth in payment methods and processors has led merchants to build complex payment infrastructure that requires dedicated in-house payment teams, incurring technical debt, inflexibility and potential regulatory challenges.

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

It’s a complex problem, but merchants can eliminate the need for large payments teams by taking payments and payment orchestration to the cloud.

Clear skies ahead with cloud-native payment orchestration layers

Payment orchestration is not a new idea, but merchants keen to future-proof their offering should be looking to the accelerated drive toward digital transformation and the advantages of cloud technology. 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.

To build scalable cloud-native payment infrastructure, merchants 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. Server-less functions should remain dormant until a consumer needs that payment method. Unified reporting should be replicable and available wherever the accounting team sits – home or otherwise – and Edge computing should push user experiences closer to customers and their specific needs.

Survive and thrive with the right payment orchestration platform

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. 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 retailers to comply with ever-changing local regulations and solving latency issues when trying to pass transaction data across large distances.

In addition to back-end orchestration which covers transaction routing to optimize for a variety of outcomes, including fraud prevention and authorization rates, among others, merchants should consider a provider that can also orchestrate the front-end checkout experience. That is, everything a merchant’s customer sees throughout their experience with the checkout, offering a merchant the ability to dynamically filter and order payment methods offered to individual customers at the checkout based on the content of a shopping cart or preferences based on previous transactions.

For example, if a merchant is working with a payment processor through a payment orchestration platform that prohibits the purchase of certain products, such as alcohol and tobacco, metadata about the contents of the shopping cart can be passed to the POP who can ‘hide’ that specific processor from the customer at the checkout and push an alternative method forward, keeping both merchant and processors happy and compliant.

Likewise, if a customer has expensive electronic products in their cart, they might be a good candidate for alternative payment methods such as open banking, so a merchant can set a rule based on transaction value (for example, $1,000+) to offer a provider for that method, such as Trustly or Vyne, as “first” in the order of payment methods displayed to the consumer.

The platform a merchant 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 merchant’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.

The gaming industry is continuing to grow at an exponential rate. The number of video game users is expected to reach almost 3.8 million by 2027, with user penetration expected to hit 35.6% the same year. In recent years, many gaming platforms have released subscription-based services, such as Ubisoft’s Uplay+ gaming flat rate, or Google Stadia’s game streaming platform to attract casual gamers and change the way consumers are playing games in general.

Beyond video games, the global esports audience is experiencing rapid growth, with figures predicting the total audience will surpass 640 million by 2025, and generating net revenue of over $1.6 billion by 2024, with China accounting for nearly a third of total global revenue.

As new games and business models spawn every month within the industry, the average revenue per user (ARPU) is projected to reach almost $84 by the end of 2022, so it’s imperative for platforms to ensure they’re doing all they can to capitalize on the opportunity.

So, how can a cloud-native payment orchestration solution boost gaming companies’ bottom lines and help them enter new and emerging markets?

Don’t lose health points integrating payments

One way gaming companies can attract and retain customers is by allowing them to pay for their service with their preferred method. Whether that’s an online cash application, money transfer, cryptocurrency, QR code, or a digital wallet.

However, for merchants, onboarding, integrating, managing, and scaling any new payment method can be a challenge. From negotiations with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) to accommodating different functionalities and APIs, it can result in months of integration work to add a single payment method to an existing payment stack and to its related fulfilment and accounting systems. Beyond that, resources will have to be invested into the back-end work needed to support updates and enhancements to a payment type across its lifecycle.

Download our free eGuide for how gaming companies can make the most of payment orchestration platforms

Local data regulation: More XP needed

In addition to individual customers’ preferred payment methods, there is also geographical complexity for merchants to contend with. This requires deep knowledge of a market’s unique payment landscape plus linguistic and technical 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.

So, how can merchants, particularly those with finite resources, cope with such varied challenges?

Double points: Harnessing the power of the cloud

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 gaming 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 gaming 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 gaming providers to enter new markets and scale for international success.

Designed with advanced capabilities and benefits, Gr4vy’s service agnostic and universal capabilities across PCI-level 1 payment credential vaulting, 3D Secure, tokenization, Apple Pay, Google Pay and more ensures that merchants always have the flexibility they need across their payments stack.

Unlike other POPs, Gr4vy makes it easy to move between service providers seamlessly with just a few clicks. And Gr4vy’s no-code infrastructure enables merchants to orchestrate payments and risk management services across multiple providers — making it easy to deploy, test and learn what services work best for their business and scale.

For more information, please visit gr4vy.com/

Payment orchestration is not a new concept, but in the past couple of years, the industry has seen an insatiable appetite for it from merchants due to the rapid growth and globalization of e-commerce. Adding multiple payment methods and keeping afloat of data and regulatory changes in local markets requires a great deal of engineering and tech resource, and can quickly eat into a company’s budget. This is where payment orchestration platforms (POPs) have stepped in to help.

But what if a merchant doesn’t want to outsource its payments, and is considering building a payment orchestration layer (POL) in-house? 

Retail Payments Global Consultancy Group (RPGC) partnered with a number of POPs, including Gr4vy, to get to the bottom of the cost of developing a POP. Using insights from the three companies, RPGC created three distinct merchant use cases to capture the requirements for different functions and features from their payment orchestration layer, and the estimates for the developer time required to build the necessary infrastructure from scratch to achieve a minimal viable product (MVP).

To download the free whitepaper from RPGC, click here. In addition to the whitepaper, Rene Pelegero, founder of RPGC, hosted a webinar discussing the findings with Merchant Risk Council (MRC) – members can watch the full recording here. For more information on IaaS vs. SaaS payment orchestration platforms and the core differences for merchants, download the eGuide here.

While building a POL in-house is certainly possible for merchants, there are a number of distinct features that only a cloud-native payment orchestration platform can offer. 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.

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.

COVID-19 acted as a catalyst for digital transformation across multiple industries, with McKinsey citing that the world saw two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months. A retailer’s e-commerce channel suddenly become critical as stores across the world faced temporary or permanent closures. Surprisingly, how retailers manage and handle payments has not largely changed, with many decisively stuck 20 years in the past. To ultimately transform, retailers need flexible, scalable, and customizable payment infrastructure.

The future of technology is in the cloud. Retailers need a payment and hosting platform that works both today and wherever digital commerce takes them in the future. Shopping carts are going headless and cloud-based, as is stock control, shipping and even warehousing solutions. In the not too distant future, retailers won’t own a single server. 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.

In this fireside chat, Martin Newman, retail expert and founder of The Consumer First Group, joins John Lunn, Founder and CEO of cloud-native payment orchestration platform, Gr4vy, and Osvaldo Spadano, Founder and CEO of hosting provider, Akoova, to discuss:

• Innovation and development in retail technology
• The impact increased consumer choice has had on merchants
• Gen Z and their preferences for payments
• ‘The Great Resignation’ and talent shortages in the industry
• How retailers should be future-proofing their operations from a technology perspective

Watch their discussion in full, and check out why companies like ELEVEN Sports have chosen to partner with Gr4vy in this case study.

If you’re a retailer and you’re seeing a growing number of transactions online, expanding internationally, have difficulty complying with local data and privacy law, and have a need for additional payment methods, find out how Gr4vy’s cloud-native payment orchestration platform can help. Check out Gr4vy’s platform, or get in touch with a member of our team.

If you’re a payment service provider and you’re interested in reaching new customers, and bringing value to existing ones, discover how you can partner with Gr4vy.