How to Build a Resilient Merchant Payment Infrastructure

In the ever-changing global environment, it’s incredibly important to build and maintain a merchant payment infrastructure that can withstand anything that comes its way. The overview you’re about to read focuses on the best practices of increasing payments resilience applicable to both merchants operating exclusively online and those pursuing an omnichannel strategy.

3 Ways of Ensuring Your Payment Infrastructure’s Efficiency

One of the main goals for growing businesses is to provide top-notch customer service with seamless payment processing that complies with all security regulations. There are several ways of achieving such a resilient merchant payment infrastructure:

Outsourced Multi-Acquirer Solutions

A multi-acquiring strategy implies a network of acquirers processing payments in different countries. This creates plenty of benefits for merchants and PSPs, such as lower costs, higher conversion rates, and improved customer experience.

Outsourcing a multi-acquiring solution is convenient because a business doesn’t have to rely on its internal engineering resources. Here are a few variations of implementing it:

Full-Stack Service Provider

You can opt for a service provider that offers both gateways and acquiring in one solution. It will route transactions through its gateway to a third-party acquirer. This solution works for businesses of virtually any scale yet has a drawback - loss of transaction pooling.

A critical challenge merchants may face with this approach is its failure to boost resilience due to the fact that it’s not the acquirer infrastructure but rather the gateway that might have availability issues.

Separate Payment Gateway and Acquirers

Before, merchants would contract acquirers and gateways separately to have more control over all parties involved. Yet, nowadays, there aren’t that many independent gateways available. Those that merchants may find when browsing for options are typically not agile enough to match the needs of a scaling digital company.

Besides, adopting such an approach would mean signing up for a single point of failure on which the whole infrastructure would depend, making an availability issue highly likely.

External Orchestration

Implementing a third-party orchestration layer enables merchants to integrate not only with multiple acquirers but also with token vaults, fraud engines, and beyond. Besides, orchestration service providers are typically working with state-of-the-art technology and offer easy setup alongside other perks.

What could be considered a downside is that the majority of orchestration players tend to be small and lacking experience in working with larger enterprises. However, as this service continues its development, the providers’ expertise will grow. Another factor to keep in mind is that outsourced orchestration typically adds extra processing costs while still creating a single point of failure.

In-House Multi-Acquirer Approach

Merchants that have sufficient engineering resources at their disposal can build an internal orchestration layer.

While an in-house multi-acquirer approach takes time, effort, and plenty of resources to implement, it has plenty of mid and long-term benefits in terms of pricing and control. This infrastructure enables real-time switching between multiple acquirers and multi-business unit connectivity to token vaults, reporting tools, authentication services, and beyond.

Besides, it reduces the single point of failure risk, as opposed to the options listed previously.

Traffic Routing and Balancing System

Introducing a flexible traffic routing and balancing system opens the doors to tackling any traffic type, business specifics, and security requirements.

While the traffic routing system groups different types of traffic for simplified processing, the machine learning balancing solution aggregates transaction statistics to determine the acquirers’ efficiency. The latter also has a positive impact on the transaction acceptance rate, facilitating an increase in the number of sales and revenue growth and a decrease in the weighted average commission of the banking and payment systems.

How Can Payneteasy Help?

At Payneteasy, we provide the most efficient digital solutions tailored to the needs of your business. Our routing and balancing system has the capacity to help merchants build a resilient payment infrastructure. Reach out now and receive a personalized quote within one business day!