First featured on Gambling Insider.
Merchants and operators want greater control over their payment process, both to ensure it meets the business goal of the firm, and to give them the options to personalise the journey for their customers to meet ever-changing market demands.
Those familiar with orchestration may have gone through the long and difficult process of building in-house technology to meet these goals and maintain ownership. But many have experienced the pain points of this instead of using third-party solutions. Many may have also seen their efforts go to waste as techstacks become obsolete and redundant as market developments continue.
For those not familiar with orchestration, let’s discuss the opportunities this technology presents and whether you should build or buy the solution for your platform.
What do orchestration solutions do for operators and what pain points do they address?
Orchestration solutions don’t just centralise and automate payment workflows, they’re at the centre of the payment ecosystem. They allow for operators to streamline processes, reduce costs, and optimise PSP routing to improve the customer experience. With the comprehensive and consolidated analytics that are available as well, operators can use this information to further customise and make UX decisions to increase transaction success.
Typical orchestrators offer smart routing, basic reporting, and connectivity but those built for the igaming industry, such as Paysecure’s solution, offer so much more. To meet the demands of the markets, these solutions include features such as a customisable cashier, scalable integrations, payment stack optimisation, and deeper analytics, with the sole purpose of increasing transaction success. Because iGaming faces so many additional considerations that other industries at the payment stage, all of these features help to achieve this one goal. That’s why operators see improved transaction approvals, with operators using Paysecure’s solutions seeing a rise of up to 7% in igaming transaction approvals.
This increase in transaction acceptance also helps to level the playing field for mid-sized and scaling operators. For too long, the largest operators are able to outspend the competition on analytics and data to customise every aspect of their UX. Now, cost-effective and revenue sharing models of orchestration solutions help smaller firms access the same technology as the big boys in the industry, giving them the tools to go toe-to-toe with the giants in the market.
We’ve already seen evidence of this. The largest operators are able to integrate every payment solution for every market because they’ve had the financial firepower to facilitate this. So, players in Denmark can pay with MobilePay and those in the Netherlands can use iDEAL. This helps retain those players and keeps them playing. What orchestration allows for is operators to plug into a pre-built network of PSPs, bypassing a huge time and resource intensive process. For smaller firms, this gives them advantages that previously, only those with the deepest pockets have been able to access.
This is also true of fraud and chargebacks, which can add huge financial pressures on smaller operators. Third-party solutions use advanced fraud tools and intelligent routing to help mitigate fraud and association chargebacks, routing transactions to the most efficient PSPs to reduce transaction fees and overall payment processing costs. Further, intelligent routing can help reduce high transaction decline rates by retrying with alternative processors to help recover “soft declines” and improve overall authorisation rates. This all helps improve the experience for the player and commercial success for the operator. This was previously technology reserved for those able to spend the most on this R&D but now, it’s available to the entire market.
Pros and cons of in-house built orchestration solutions
So shall operators build their own orchestration technology to adopt all of these features into their platforms? There could be some advantages. To start, gaining all the benefits of orchestration versus a fractious and complex system of individual processes is certainly a step up in efficiency and simplicity. Furthermore, an in-house built solution would help operators design a solution exactly for their needs.
However, these in-house solutions are expensive. They require significant initial and ongoing investment into them, such as hardware, storage, cooling, and expertise to build and maintain the technology. Additionally, infrastructure management, including data management, can be incredibly expensive, and can often be overlooked or underestimated as an ongoing and often increasing cost for operators.
With the market moving at such pace, an operator may design a solution that meets their goals for today, but it may prove unsuitable as they scale and grow. The time investment is also a significant and often overlooked barrier to entry. By the time an in-house solution is ready for adoption, it may already be out of date for the operator in the market they find themselves in. Pre-built integrations allows operators to seize new opportunities by significantly reducing the time and resources required to deploy new payment solutions or enter new markets, helping operators reach their commercial goals faster and future proofing their offering by staying nimble and adapting to what players want and expect to see.
Furthermore, orchestration solutions provide operators with unprecedented depths of data and analytics. The volume of data may surpass the level of information that operators are aware of, as it leverages data at all stages of the payment process. By integrating a leading igaming payment orchestration solution, such Paysecure’s ecosystem, a myriad of data points delivered by our 360 in-depth reporting, layered with our unique AI-driven cashier data, feeds into customer segmentation tools, allowing operators to improve the customer experience.
At the cashier stage of the customer journey, operators can clearly see why players transact or not, and whether aspects of marketing and promotion have been successful. This includes first-time and returning customers. There may be elements of data that in-house solutions don’t collect, due to not having deep integration with all PSPs, payment methods, and other technology solutions providers in the payment process. Data from Paysafe shows that over 30% of ecommerce merchant finance teams don’t receive detailed payments data, meaning they’re missing key insights which are critical for informed decision making. In-house solutions may not fully capture all the relevant data available to inform operational decisions to drive growth and success, compared to the wealth of analytics available through orchestrators.
Why customisable orchestration is the magic bullet for operators
Despite third-party orchestration solutions largely being more effective for many operators, not all off-the-shelf solutions are created equal. To truly ensure the technology works for you, your company, and your players, both for today and tomorrow, customisable orchestration technology is crucial. That is why our philosophy at Paysecure is that the customer sits at the centre of everything, so our solutions are built for your customers first and foremost.
From day 1, bought-in solutions enable operators to access the best-in-class technology, putting them on a level as the world’s largest companies in the igaming sector. Specifically for mid-sized operators, this allows them to level up their customers’ experience and payment journey from insights delivered through orchestration. This deeper data helps them make better decisions, and as a more nimble operator, they can utilise these learnings faster than larger organisations. The real power of orchestration lies in real-time aggregated data that allows operators to act on information as soon as it happens.
Using modular solutions offered by orchestrators such as Paysecure’s dynamic cashier, operators are able to customise the cashier experience in SandBox mode, test, learn, and implement improvements at speed and at scale, helping to maximise revenue and improve the product offering. The Cashier helps operators understand customer behaviour, which can be crucial for marketing activities to deliver a return on investment. Analytics at this stage will show where users abandon the process, how long they spend on each step of the user journey, and how they interact with each part of the process, such as clicking on a promotion banner before making a deposit.
This can also be done across all customer segments. Data captured across the payment flow can be used to inform customer segments, enabling operators to build journeys specific to their audience, driving positive customer behaviours, such as rewarding VIP customers while mitigating risk and fraud with new players.
Orchestrators have access to networks of PSPs and payment providers, giving operators access to the market through one solution, instead of needing to foster each relationship through an in-house built orchestration solution. Furthermore, as we do at Paysecure, we can help facilitate great commercial relationships between operators and payment gateways, which can be significant for scaling operators who are looking to venture into new markets. This future-proofs your payment experience, enabling operators to leverage the deep data insights, and wealth of integrations and access in-built features to expedite better transaction performance.
Customisable and modular technology allows operators to cherry pick the solutions they need to reduce costs, and only use the technology they need for the best outcome for them right now. Scalable solutions mean operators don’t need to integrate complex orchestration platforms immediately, allowing mid-sized 2 and 3 operators to solve existing challenges, and grow with solutions that can integrate new features and functionality to enhance their payment operation.
In conclusion
So should you build or buy? Many operators have been exposed to the benefits of orchestration, but have been concerned about the cost, ownership of data, and limits of third-party solutions. With next generation ecosystems, such as Paysecure’s offering, these concerns have been answered with a significant shift in the market.
With affordable, highly-scalable, and fully integrated technologies available, there has never been a stronger case for adopting third-party orchestrated solutions, particularly for operators looking to scale quickly. As they become more sophisticated and global, in-house solutions will not be able to keep pace and bought-in technology will be the only viable solution. What will separate successful from unsuccessful operators will be the speed of adoption of orchestration and third-party ecosystems. So if your competitors are leveraging third-party solutions and data, can you afford not to?
