Payments Orchestration Lets Aggregators Add More Value

PYMNTS interviews Randy Guard, chief marketing officer and product officer at Spreedly, about why marketplaces or aggregators need payments orchestration solutions to provide the best value for their merchant partners.

—

Marketplaces, or merchant aggregators, perform vital tasks for their merchant partners, without which the latter would struggle to succeed in the modern digital economy. Consumers need access to dozens of different payment methods, depending on their personal preferences, and aggregators need to ensure that their partners can provide these methods to their customers.

“Aggregators create a platform and an environment for businesses — whether they are restaurants, sell digital goods or offer association-based tools — so that they can add value or help extend the reach of their customers through a centralized solution.”

Consumers that do not see their preferred payment methods available are much likelier to abandon a purchase in favor of another seller that meets their payment needs. This means that merchants, in turn, will seek the aggregator partners that can help them enable these methods for their customers.

“[Merchants] want to spend their development energy and their business energy on differentiation in their markets and the growth that they want. Therefore, they’re not going out to hire payments engineers or payments product managers to define and build and then maintain the payment stack. They’re outsourcing that to us.”

Merchant aggregators that can provide their merchant partners with the payment services they need can offer the greatest value to merchants. Partnering with payments orchestration providers is the best way for aggregators to enable the right payment services for their customers — and to focus their efforts on their own areas of value-adding expertise.

“[Aggregators] offer software and services for thousands of merchant customers. They are very good at what they offer, but they are not fraud providers, they’re not payments providers, they’re not PCI scope experts. They want to abstract all of that and offload it too.”