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Payments orchestration gap: connected is not orchestrated, RS2 warns

Monday, September 14, 2026 — 15:50:06 (UTC)

The Payments Orchestration Gap: Connected Is Not Orchestrated, RS2 Warns

89% of businesses have payment failover but fewer than half dynamically route transactions, just 7% have full control over payment tokens

Malta/Frankfurt, 14 September 2026: Businesses risk mistaking payment connectivity and basic failover for genuine payments orchestration, leaving significant improvements in transaction performance, resilience and control unrealised, according to RS2, a Tier-1 global provider of cloud-native payment processing infrastructure and payment technology solutions

RS2’s new white paper, The Orchestration Imperative: Turning Payment Complexity into Strategic Advantage, argues that the next phase of payments orchestration will be determined not by how many providers a business can connect to, but by how intelligently it can control and optimise what happens across those connections.

The distinction is increasingly important as businesses operate across a growing combination of payment methods, gateways, acquirers, fraud services, token providers and regulatory environments.

Research cited in the paper highlights the scale of the maturity gap. While 89% of organisations surveyed had implemented payment failover or redundancy, only 41% had automated dynamic routing and just 22% continuously updated their routing logic. Only 7% had full control over payment tokens, while 3% said adding a new payment rail was very easy.

More significantly, 55% continued to make routing decisions manually and 68% relied on manual intervention to switch providers during outages.

RS2 argues that this distinction between being connected and being orchestrated is becoming critical to payment performance.

Radi El Haj, Group CEO at RS2, said: “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.”

The potential impact is significant. Among companies in the research possessing five key orchestration capabilities, 78% reported transaction-completion improvements of at least 2%, compared with only 10% of organisations possessing three or four.

For businesses processing payments at scale, even relatively small improvements in completion rates can translate into meaningful additional revenue while reducing the operational cost and risk associated with managing increasingly complex payment environments.

RS2 identifies five capabilities that distinguish mature payment orchestration: connect, control, optimise, protect and adapt.

Together, these allow organisations to connect multiple providers through a consistent integration layer; apply business and commercial rules centrally; dynamically route and retry transactions; coordinate fraud and authentication controls; and introduce new providers, markets and payment rails without repeatedly rebuilding core payment infrastructure.

The implications differ across the payments ecosystem.

For merchants, intelligent routing and automated retries can reduce avoidable declines and preserve transactions during provider disruption. PSPs and PayFacs can use orchestration to build more configurable services and differentiate beyond increasingly commoditised processing.

Banks can introduce new payment capabilities progressively alongside legacy infrastructure, while acquirers can strengthen resilience and performance visibility and maintain a more strategic role in the merchant relationship as larger merchants increasingly adopt multi-acquirer models.

El Haj added: “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.”

The white paper concludes with an Orchestration Readiness Test, enabling organisations to assess their current capabilities across routing, failover, token control, payment-rail deployment, performance measurement and provider portability.

The Orchestration Imperative: Turning Payment Complexity into Strategic Advantage is available to download from RS2.

For more information on RS2, visit www.rs2.com.

ENDS

About RS2

RS2 is a global, cloud-native payments technology provider, delivering end-to-end issuing and acquiring on a single platform - BankWORKS®.

Processing over 31 billion transactions annually with 99.99% platform uptime, RS2 enable banks, financial institutions, and payments companies to simplify complexity, scale internationally, and operate with full control across the payments value chain.

A listed company with over 35 years of expertise, RS2 combines proven processing capabilities with modern, cloud native, modular architecture designed for today’s digital payments ecosystem.

RS2’s BankWORKS® platform stands out as a robust cloud-native solution designed for both issuing and acquiring operations. With its advanced orchestration layer seamlessly integrating all aspects of business operations, clients gain access to comprehensive analytics, reporting tools, and reconciliation features.

This empowers businesses to effortlessly expand their global footprint through a single integration, while also gaining valuable insights into payment processes and customer behaviour, enhancing operational efficiency, increasing conversion rates, mitigating fraud and driving profitability.

www.RS2.com www.beyondbyrs2.com

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Source: Company press release.

Categories: Reports and research