ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How to remove the barriers to entry for merchants to access best-in-class infrastructure
For any digital enterprise, from a startup e-commerce merchant to a massive global platform, the main hurdles to success are no longer product development but the complex, high-availability, and expensive infrastructure required for secure payments, compliance, and customer experience at scale.
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he recent announcement regarding proposed increases to the Gambling Commission (GC) licensing and operating fees by the DCMS has sparked understandable concern within the industry. Particularly after the 40 per cent tax blow handed down to us from Labour’s last budget.
Historically, businesses faced a difficult dilemma: Building in-house requires a costly, multi-year, six- or seven-figure upfront investment, an option only for market giants. Furthermore, the total cost included ongoing maintenance and a dedicated IT team, which can add over 20 per cent of the initial investment annually. Alternatively, buying a gateway could mean you’re locked into rigid systems that can’t adapt to evolving business needs, new payment methods, rapidly changing global regulations, and stricter compliance standards. This created an inefficient, two-tiered system: large companies were burdened by bespoke, costly, and slow-to-adapt in-house systems, while scaling firms were hobbled by systems that actively impeded their growth and adaptability.
THE TRUE CONVERSION KILLERS: A SERIES OF FRICTIONS The actual barriers to entry are not large obstacles but a ‘death by a thousand cuts’, a series of deep frictions within the payment flow. For large, multi-region organisations, there isn’t a single process; flows are complex, multi-party, and depend on the payment method, supplier, region, risk profile, and compliance needs. Developing and operating these flows demands profound technical expertise.
A poorly designed payment platform has significant hidden costs. First, false declines. A study revealed that 33 per cent of customers who experience a false decline permanently stop shopping with that merchant.
Secondly, to succeed globally, businesses must be hyper-local. Research from PYMNTS. com shows that 99 per cent of cross-border shoppers expect to use their preferred local payment methods. In many emerging markets, local options account for over 75 per cent of online purchases, making single-gateway systems a hard barrier to international expansion. And third, high-compliance sectors (e.g., FOREX, crypto, investing), slow, separate Know-Your-
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Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) checks force users to wait days to fund their accounts, resulting in massive drop-off. These systemic failures highlight the need for robust, resilient payment systems with a level of excellence rarely seen in other enterprise software. Handling ‘unhappy paths’, like building in failover capabilities to instantly retry soft declines or partner outages, is a critical hygiene factor, not an optional extra, especially when processing millions of transactions monthly.
THE HIGH-RISK BLUEPRINT: FROM PIPE TO ORCHESTRATION Sectors that are global, high-volume, and customer-centric have already solved these problems. They moved beyond the concept of a single payment ‘pipe’ to adopt payment orchestration: an intelligent, flexible layer that sits above all individual payment partners. This orchestration layer acts as a central exchange, removing barriers in real-time. First, smart routing instantly retries soft declines or routes the transaction to a different acquirer, saving the sale and protecting the customer experience. Second, a single API connection to the platform provides merchants access to hundreds of local payment methods, massively simplifying global expansion. And finally, it unifies the user journey by integrating Fraud prevention and AML monitoring directly into the payment flow, allowing for transaction-level verification.
REMOVING THE FINAL BARRIER: ACCESS AND COST
Orchestration technology is the clear solution. However, building a global orchestration platform still requires high-cost, specialised payment and technology talent. The final barrier remains financial and resource based. Developing such a platform is high-risk, a significant capital expense, and often diverts funds from core business functions like marketing or shareholder dividends.
The good news is that companies have made this investment. By offering its orchestration platform as a service, Paysecure for example democratises access to global payments on a low-cost basis. This approach eliminates the need for substantial capital investments and the struggle to find rare payment/ technology hires.
This shift – from monolithic, costly in-house builds to scalable, modular, API-first platforms pioneered by actors like Paysecure – will redefine payment systems across all sectors. It levels the playing field, allowing businesses to redirect focus and resources to product development and customer experience. Over the coming years, most leading organisations are expected to migrate to orchestration solutions. Even large firms with existing platforms will find it increasingly difficult to justify bespoke IT investment for non-core functions to their shareholders. New market entrants will bypass incumbents entirely by starting directly with payment orchestration services, freeing up precious capital and resources to build their business and gain market share.
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