This white paper presents the business case for enterprise merchants to utilize an abstraction layer that consolidates payments functionality into a single business-oriented architecture. The payments ecosystem is complex, exacerbated by fragmentation. No single Payment Service Provider can fully service every market and each merchant must develop the exact same logic and requirements to comply with the changes imposed by the card schemes. In-house solutions are typically engineering driven and since payments expertise is rare among engineers, most legacy architecture is manual and burdensome on IT.

The proposed business-oriented architecture, called a Payments Orchestration Layer (POL), addresses these above challenges. POLs are built on four key pillars of global connectivity, smart routing, real-time ledgers and end-user tools. This architecture allows merchants to use payments to further pursue their goals of enhancing the customer experience, lowering costs and supporting market growth.