RS2 warns businesses confuse connectivity with orchestration

RS2 has published research suggesting many businesses confuse payment connectivity with full payment orchestration, a gap it says is limiting transaction performance and operational control.

The findings focus on how organisations manage payment routing, provider switching and token control across multiple payment partners. RS2 said 89% of organisations surveyed had payment failover or redundancy in place, but only 41% used automated dynamic routing and 22% continuously updated their routing logic.

Token control was one of the weakest areas in the study. Just 7% of respondents said they had full control over payment tokens, while only 3% said adding a new payment rail was very easy.

Manual processes also remained common. The research found that 55% of organisations still made routing decisions manually and 68% relied on manual intervention to switch providers during outages.

The distinction matters because businesses are dealing with a wider mix of payment methods, gateways, acquirers, fraud tools, token providers and regulatory requirements. RS2 argued that orchestration's value now lies less in connecting to several providers and more in controlling what happens across those links.

Radi El Haj, Group Chief Executive Officer at RS2, made that case in the report.

"Connecting to multiple payment providers is no longer the difficult part. The question is what you can do once those connections exist. Can every transaction be routed according to performance, cost and risk? Can you automatically move traffic when a provider fails? Can you introduce a new payment method or acquirer without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure? And, crucially, can you make those decisions using real-time intelligence rather than manual intervention? That is where orchestration moves from being an integration exercise to becoming a strategic capability," El Haj said.

Performance gap

The study also linked orchestration maturity to payment completion rates. Among companies identified as having five key orchestration features, 78% reported transaction-completion improvements of at least 2%.

By comparison, 10% of organisations with only three or four of those features reported the same improvement. For payment businesses operating at scale, a shift of that size can affect revenue as well as the cost of managing complex payment operations.

RS2 said five elements distinguish more mature orchestration models: connect, control, optimise, protect and adapt. In practice, that means using a consistent integration layer for multiple providers, setting business rules centrally, routing and retrying transactions dynamically, aligning fraud and authentication tools, and adding providers or payment rails without repeatedly changing core systems.

The implications vary across the payments market. For merchants, better routing and automated retries can help reduce avoidable declines and keep transactions flowing during provider disruption.

Payment service providers and payment facilitators can use the same approach to offer more configurable services in a market where basic processing is becoming harder to differentiate. Banks, meanwhile, can add payment functions alongside older systems, while acquirers may use orchestration to improve resilience and maintain a stronger role with merchants as multi-acquirer models become more common.

El Haj said the growing complexity behind the scenes is not visible to consumers, who increasingly expect payments to work with minimal friction.

"Payments are becoming more complex underneath precisely as consumers expect them to become simpler. The organisations that succeed will not necessarily be those with the most connections. They will be those capable of making the entire payment ecosystem behave as one intelligent environment - continuously selecting the best route, responding to disruption and adapting as markets, costs and customer behaviour change," El Haj said.