Open Payments Platforms: The New Standard for Optimized Transactions

A new era of payment innovation is on the horizon. 

The global payment industry has undergone quite a technological overhaul over recent years. More companies are embracing the spirit of connectivity, leading to a rise in platforms that enable multi-provider and multi-integration capabilities. 

Open payments platforms offer exactly this—an open payment environment where users can integrate different payment service providers, fraud tools, and other operational essentials. 

We’ve seen the term “open” floating around for some time now in the tech space. There are more than a few terms describing these types of technologies, often centered around their ability to clarify and optimize communications between financial organizations, businesses, and consumers. 

Spreedly’s open payments platform concept aims to provide a central ecosystem where all of these technologies can meet and work together.  

What Makes Open Payments Platforms “Open” 

An open payments platform uses several distinct tools to achieve an agile payment environment. 

One such technology is APIs, which are critical enablers of things like process automation and multichannel communications. The online API market was worth $200 million in 2023, signifying the technology’s growing prevalence and adoption in financial services. APIs have also become a trend topic in the financial industry known for their ability to improve user experiences and cross-border payments, Statista researchers report. 

An imperative component of our open payments platform concept is the ability to build a vendor-agnostic approach to payments. Rather than becoming locked in with one provider, these platforms enable you to connect to multiple different providers and tools based on your specific needs. 

Unlike closed or proprietary software, an open payments platform supports integrations with a multitude of third-party services and solutions. 

Where Does Payment Orchestration Fit Into Open Payments Platforms? 

Payment orchestration has paved the way toward more streamlined payments. Through the use of a single platform, you can manage and optimize transactions in a fully integrated environment. 

The benefits of orchestration have been widespread, from reducing transaction costs to improving payment success rates. Tools like intelligent payment routing and real-time data accessibility have proven immensely useful for building more intuitive and efficient payment processes.

Yet, the definition of payment orchestration is evolving, and so must your approach to payments.

Open payments build on orchestration’s enablement of a more connected financial ecosystem. 

The orchestration process still exists but resides within the context of a broader open payments platform. At the same time, the platform takes on much of the technical responsibility of keeping different integrations connected and well-maintained. This assistance proves to be a necessity when creating and managing orchestrated payments.  

Examining the Cost Savings Potential 

When you’re locked in with one provider, you are subject to their pricing model alone. 

Implementation of an open payments platform gives you the freedom to maintain accounts with multiple vendors at a time without making any exclusive commitments to one over the other. What’s more, is that you can mix and match things like payment gateways to build the tech stack that best suits your business and its transactional needs. 

The ability to switch between gateways allows you to set up both primary and secondary gateways to route payments through. Should your primary gateway fail, you can set configurable rules that automatically reroute that payment to another service more likely to work. You can recover revenue that may have otherwise been lost due to a failure of your initial gateway. 

Revenue recovery is not the final benefit either. 

By optimizing your payment system configuration with your ideal integrations and ensuring your platform has peak operational flexibility, you can also greatly improve customer churn. A smooth payment experience that does not disrupt the checkout flow or burden the customer with extra work or unnecessary interactions keeps customers satisfied. 

To summarize, the cost saving potential of open payments platforms is as follows:

• More flexible pricing that supports experimentation
• Operational resilience from support for multiple service provider integrations
• Reduced customer churn rates from improved payment experiences

Making the Leap Into Open Payments Platforms

It’s time to update your payment infrastructure. 

An open payments platform can revitalize your financial strategy by:

• Optimizing global payment performance
• Keeping captured payment data secure and evergreen
• Reducing the burden of compliance, including for leading standards like the PCI DSS

Payment orchestration lays a fundamentally necessary foundation for enabling a diverse mix of integrations and vendors. In many ways, it is the core that powers open payments platforms.

If you’re coming from a legacy system, this change can feel tremendous. You may have wanted to try out orchestration before but lacked the modernization to use it fully without a whole new platform implementation. What open payments platforms provide is a ready-to-use environment that you can customize to your needs and even work with your legacy systems. 

In the case of Spreedly, our platform provides you with everything you need to establish a comprehensive and profitable payments strategy. Along with our payment orchestration and API capabilities, Spreedly also offers an Advanced Vault for storing payment and card information. 

The Advanced Vault can enrich your payment lifecycles with network tokenization and automatic updating features to keep data evergreen. Our vaulting capabilities work in tandem with the open payments platform to lift your acceptance rates and enhance your overall strategy with detailed insights into your payment performance. 

Tap into the Power of Open Payments Platforms

Spreedly’s open payments platform leverages advanced orchestration to provide you with a resilient and growth-enabled payment system. With our PCI-compliant advanced vault and smart routing tools, your customers can enjoy seamless checkout experiences using their preferred payment methods. 

Take complete control of your payments and reduce your compliance burden with Spreedly.

Find out how Spreedly works today. 

Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below