How to Untangle the Knots in Your Payments Tech Stack

For the average consumer, buying something online is incredibly simple. Find the product, put it in your cart, pay for the item, then wait by the door for your package to arrive. What consumers don’t see is the astoundingly complex ecosystem behind the scenes of their payment. And this is the part that can make or break your business. 

You’re not just collecting money anymore. You are the manager of a labyrinth of security standards and international regulations. You are the gatekeeper of evolving fraud schemes. It’s a lot to keep track of. 

Your payments tech stack, the collection of tools and services you use to handle these transactions, is at the very core of your ability to grow. The problem that we see often is that for many businesses, that stack is less of an asset and more of a liability. It’s got more knots than a rope at a Boy Scout Jamboree, creating risk and draining resources.

If this is your current reality, this post will help you sift through the challenges that make payments complicated, and then present a clear model for success. Let’s turn your payment stack from a cost center into a strategic advantage that drives your company’s growth. Let’s get started.

How modern commerce can get you tied up in knots

You already know that we live in a world of global commerce. Your business operates in a world where commerce has no borders. That expansion can create obstacles that can tie up an outdated tech stack like a hog at a county fair. These factors, though, are table stakes for any serious business. 

First, you have to deal with PCI compliance. These are the security standards that protect cardholder data, and the burden of meeting them can be immense. Failing to comply can result in substantial fines and you could even be expelled from payment card programs. This is a situation you’re likely not interested in going through. 

Beyond the financial penalties, a security breach can lead to devastating reputational damage and a complete loss of customer trust. If you add this all up, the costs of maintaining compliance can range from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars annually. That’s not nothing. 

Second, you have to be prepared for cross-border transactions. You’re likely selling to customers in other countries, whether you intended to or not. More than half of all online shoppers have purchased from an overseas retailer, and the value of these cross-border transactions is projected to hit nearly $2 trillion in 2024 alone. 

Where you can get tied up here is in attempting to navigate the incredibly complex web of different currencies, exchange rates, and local payment preferences. What works in the United States does not work in Germany or China, where mobile wallets and bank transfers dominate. If your payment stack is not equipped for these local preferences, you’re leaving money on the table. 

Finally, you’re dealing with “the bowline knot” of tech stacks: fraud. The shift from in-person to online shopping has made card-not-present (CNP) fraud the most common type of card fraud. In countries like Australia, CNP fraud accounts for an overwhelming majority of all reported card fraud. 

The financial cost of fraud is staggering. For every one dollar in fraudulent transactions, a merchant loses between three and four dollars in lost goods, fees, and administrative time. Is your payment tech stack up to the task? 

How to walk the payments maturity model tightrope

These are not insignificant challenges for merchants to face. And you can’t fix them by just adding more tools to a broken system. In order to untangle the knots caused by all of these factors, you’ll have to change your approach to payments. That might sound daunting, but we’ll walk you through the steps here. 

These four steps to progressing though a payment maturity model will give you a clear, logical pathway to go from a basic setup with many challenges, to a sophisticated, high-performing payments platform that meets all of your needs. 

Like every journey, we begin at Step 1: Digital Payments. This is likely a foundation you’ve already set. You can accept transactions digitally, but likely only through a single payment gateway. It’s a crucial first step, but the issue is that it is a rigid setup with a single point of failure. 

It’s like using a simple square knot to secure a critical line. It might hold for a while, but you know that it will come loose under pressure and you have no way to quickly adjust it when you need to. 

So you move on to Stage 2: Agile, Orchestrated Workflows. You recognize the limitations of your single-gateway setup and you start using multiple payment providers. You add a new gateway for a specific market, or a dedicated fraud tool to combat rising chargebacks. 

This approach may add some agility to your workflow by adding new capabilities, it often results in a complex web of point-to-point integrations. Each new connection is a custom project, and these systems don’t effectively communicate or share data. 

This is where the basics of orchestration begin. You can get a payment from A to B with more flexibility, but you’re primarily focused on keeping those payments on the rails: the direct path a transaction takes. 

What you’re missing is the support around a payment that really keeps merchants like yourself running smoothly. For example, your fraud tool may provide a score, but it isn’t automatically routing transactions based on that score. Your different gateways don’t share tokenized data, forcing you to maintain separate customer profiles.

Yes, this is a massive improvement, but it’s agile without being truly strategic or holistic. It’s a stepping stone towards a more unified system. 

The good news, though, is that you’re halfway there. 

Now you move on to Stage 3: Optimized, Automated Payments Operations. You’ve begun to streamline your processes. You automate manual tasks and build systems that can intelligently route transactions to the most effective gateway or retry a declined payment. 

This stage is about efficiency. You’re using technology to work smarter, reducing manual labor and improving your success rates. It’s a really crucial stage in the development of your business. 

The ultimate goal is to reach Stage 4: An Open, Secure, Payments Performance Platform. You’ve untangled the line and have mastered every knot, from a reliable bowline to a versatile sheet bend and can use any one for any job. 

You’re no longer dealing with a wildly disconnected collection of services. Now you have a single, unified platform. Like a central nervous system for all of your payment operations where you can gain a holistic view and have complete control over every transaction. 

This isn't just about optimizing the path a transaction takes—it’s about providing open access to the wealth of data and tools that support your entire organization.

An open payments platform empowers teams beyond just payments. Your finance team can access the granular settlement data and reconciliation tools they need to be most effective at their job. Operations teams are able to view detailed, on-demand reporting about last month’s payment volumes and chargeback rates. Your support team can instantly look up a customer’s full payment history to resolve issues quickly.

This stage is about unlocking the full value of your payments data and technology by utilizing a platform built for maximum performance, security, and growth. 

Tying it all together with an open payments platform

As your final, and most important step in your payments maturity model, the open payment platform is an essential aspect of unlocking the full potential of your payments stack. An open payments platform will unlock payment orchestration, giving you a single point of access to the global payments ecosystem. 

This is a platform that allows you to connect to a whole host of payment gateways, fraud tools, and local payment methods through a single integration. Now you’ve turned this complex knot of connections into a single, simplified, centralized hub. 

And you’ve done more than that. With an open payments platform, you’ve tied together all of the core payments activities of your entire team. Your fraud, finance, customer support teams, and others all derive value from the platform. They’re all able to consume services from one single platform, and the value of this cannot be overstated. 

What you’re really going to like about this are the immediate and tangible benefits. You’ll reduce your compliance burden and costs with the orchestration layer centralizing security standards like PCI. 

Now you don’t have to manage this with every integration. You’re not just mitigating your risk, but you’re also saving a ton of time and money. You free up developer resources, allowing your engineers to focus on adding products and features that add value to your business, rather than spending hours and hours writing code for platform integrations. Just plug into the platform and the orchestrator handles the rest. 

The last, and potentially the biggest reason to use an open payments platform, is that you get access to a depth of industry expertise you could never build yourself. Being able to leverage the knowledge from hundreds of deployments to guide your strategy ensures you’re on the right track. 

And being able to talk to dedicated account managers with insider knowledge lets you make sure you’re using the right providers for the right situations. 

Payments orchestration transforms your operations. It moves you from a reactive approach—constantly fixing broken connections and dealing with declines—to a proactive one, where your payments stack is an optimized machine that works for you.

Mastering the tech stack ropes

A modern payments tech stack is a business-critical asset. You are no longer just competing on your product or your brand; you are competing on your ability to process a transaction seamlessly and securely. Your payment stack determines your authorization rates, your fraud losses, your compliance costs, and your ability to enter new markets.

By leveraging an open payments performance platform, you move from merely processing payments to strategically leveraging them. You are now able to launch new products, expand into new markets, and meet your revenue goals with a confidence you never had before. 

A strategic payments stack allows you to take control of your financial destiny and focus on the core strengths that define your business. This is not a technical choice; it is a business imperative. Your company's future depends on it.

Ready to future-proof your payments strategy? Get in touch with our team today.

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