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8 July 2026
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For a long time, banks’ payment infrastructures were not a focus of investment. As long as it worked, there seemed little reason to modernize it. At the same time, bank mergers and the integration of new technologies have made it increasingly interconnected, intertwined, and complex. A simple change to one payment flow in this spaghetti-like tangle can affect multiple other services. This would require planning, downtime, reconfiguration, testing, and other necessary but costly and time-consuming processes. New modernization drivers such as instant and account-to-account (A2A) payments or new standards such as ISO 20022 often mean that complex systems are no longer able to handle large payment volumes. These changes require banks to be able to connect their systems to the central infrastructure. At the same time, regulators are demanding that they improve their capabilities in terms of volume, reliability, functionality, and consumer protection, for example to reduce the risk of fraud in A2A payments.
All this and the competitive pressure make modernization seem sensible. According to Juniper Research, a payment orchestration platform (POP) with smart routing offers a key technology for this and is already being used by e-commerce companies. POPs can integrate and manage multiple payment methods such as credit cards, wallets, bank transfers, and even cryptocurrencies. Payment processors are using these API-based platforms to transform the payment processing process for merchants, especially when it comes to coordinating payments across multiple geographies. The goal is to automate transactions to the payment providers or networks with the lowest costs and highest authorization rates. Machine learning and artificial intelligence systems can improve the accuracy of intelligent routing decisions. By collecting and analyzing a large number of historical and real-time data points, routing systems can dynamically adapt to changes, such as rerouting a transaction to another provider if one provider experiences downtime. This routing can also use backup mechanisms to avoid transaction errors.
However, POPs also have the potential to go beyond the field of e-commerce. They promise to help financial institutions modernize their payments. The goal of orchestration is to create an event-driven framework that connects and interacts with all the systems needed to manage payment flows end-to-end. For every input, output, or decision, the bank generates an event that gives it complete visibility and control over all processes in the entire payment flow. Once the bank has implemented payment orchestration, it can make changes to payment flows much more quickly and seamlessly, significantly reducing the cost of such changes.
Grand View Research predicts that the global market for POPs will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24.7% to nearly 7 billion US dollars by 2030.
Gabriel Juri SIX
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