Build vs. Buy: choosing the right payment orchestration strategy

Payment orchestration offers a smarter way to streamline and centralise your payment stack. But the big question is: should you build your own or buy an existing solution?

This guide compares building vs buying a payment orchestration and provides a decision-making framework to help you choose the right strategy for your business.

What is a payment orchestration platform?

Let’s refresh the basics to make sure we’re on the same page.

Core features of a POP

Before diving into the specifics of building a solution, let’s take a moment to check out what features an orchestrator needs to stay competitive.

• Unified PSP adapter. One integration point to connect and manage multiple PSPs and gateways.
• Smart payment routing. Automatically sends payments through the optimal provider based on real-time conditions like cost, success rate, or geo.
• Cascading. Detects provider outages or failures and reroutes transactions without disrupting the customer experience.
• Fraud prevention. Uses rules and signals to block suspicious activity and reduce chargebacks.
• Analytics & reporting. Consolidated dashboards and logs offering full visibility into payment performance and operations.
• Customisable checkout. Allows to configure branded, dynamic checkout experiences tailored to regions, products, or customer types – without coding efforts.

A POP comes in handy for businesses managing multiple brands or projects, especially in fast-moving or high-risk industries like gambling or crypto. These companies often deal with a bunch of challenges – scattered integrations, different regulations in every region, higher chances of fraud, and approval rates that vary from one country to another.

That’s where payment orchestration steps in. It gives them one place to centralise control, stay flexible with how and where payments are routed, and choose the best providers for the job. It also helps cut down on fraud and declines, keeps them compliant, and makes it way easier to scale or pivot without tearing everything down and starting from scratch.

Building a payment orchestrator: steps & challenges

A custom-built POP enables full control over your payment orchestration strategy, tailored specifically to your operations and long-term vision. It’s about engineering a centralised system to manage everything from provider integrations and routing logic to reporting, fraud controls, and compliance workflows.

Unlike using an off-the-shelf solution, you're not limited by someone else's roadmap or constraints. But you’re also responsible for everything: architecture, code, operations, compliance, and scalability.

Key steps involved in building a POP

Building a payment orchestration platform is a long-term engineering commitment. Here's a step-by-step breakdown:

1. Define your requirements. Start by mapping out your business needs. What markets will you serve? Which payment methods do you need? What reporting, fraud control, and compliance requirements must be met? Getting this right early shapes every decision that follows.
2. Assemble the right team. You’ll need a dedicated squad: frontend, backend and DevOps engineers, a product owner with payments expertise, compliance and security officers, and QA engineers.
3. Design the system architecture. Plan how all services will interact. Define using APIs, event queues, retry strategies, monitoring and logging. You’ll need to support high availability, fault tolerance, and region-specific compliance rules.
4. Integrate providers. Start by connecting to your highest-priority PSPs. Normalise inconsistent data formats, build in support for 3DS, recurring billing, retries, and tokenisation if needed. Test for edge cases and PSP-specific behaviours.
5. Develop a routing engine. Build a logic layer that chooses the best payment path in real time, based on geography, cost, success rates, or business rules. Include failover logic to increase conversion rates.
6. Implement anti-fraud & compliance modules. Build risk management rules, 3DS triggers, and chargeback tracking. Make PCI DSS compliance part of your base architecture.
7. Support custom checkout logic. Ensure flexibility to run different checkout flows for different projects, brands, or geographies.
8. Build dashboards and analytics. Create real-time operational dashboards for finance and support teams. Include transaction tracing, settlement reports, routing performance.
9. Test rigorously. Use sandbox PSP environments, simulate edge cases, and run load testing. QA is critical – errors here affect revenue and trust.
10. Prepare for ongoing monitoring & support. Set up alerting for failures, slowdowns, or unexpected behaviour. Define how you'll handle PSP outages, transaction anomalies, and compliance updates over time. Make sure your team has a disaster recovery plan in place – one that outlines how to quickly restore operations in the event of a major disruption. Aim to maintain a low MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery or Restore) to minimise downtime and protect both revenue and user experience.

Every step requires careful design and cross-team collaboration. If done right, the result is a highly adaptable, provider-agnostic infrastructure that supports business expansion without increasing operational chaos.

Why build?

Challenges to consider

Buying a payment orchestrator: considerations & benefits

Buying a ready-made payment orchestration platform means integrating a solution that’s already built, tested, and optimised for managing payments across multiple providers and markets. This is often the fastest route to modernising your payment stack – especially if you don’t have the internal resources or time to build from scratch.

How to choose a payment orchestration platform

1. Start with clear use cases. Consider whether you're building payment infrastructure for other merchants or just optimising your own – a POP can support both. Identify the key pain points in your current payment setup – high decline rates, PSP outages, limited visibility, reporting issues, or slow integrations. These are the challenges a payment orchestrator should solve.
2. Prioritise your requirements. Break your needs down into must-haves vs. nice-to-haves. Consider key areas like supported PSPs, local payment methods, routing capabilities, compliance coverage, etc.
3. Research the ecosystem. Shortlist vendors with a track record in your industry, especially those that support your markets or compliance needs. Read case studies, ask for references, and check if they serve businesses similar in scale and complexity to yours.
4. Compare features. When evaluating payment orchestration vendors, use a feature matrix to compare aspects like API design, dashboard quality, PSP coverage, and – if you operate in high-risk industries like crypto or gambling – support for those specific use cases. For businesses in lower-risk sectors, the focus may shift toward conversion optimisation, regional reach, and ease of integration.
5. Validate compliance & security. Confirm the platform is PCI DSS compliant, handles sensitive data responsibly, and supports necessary regulatory requirements like GDPR and PSD2. Look for certifications and audit processes.
6. Test integrations. Run a sandbox or pilot integration to check for technical limitations, ease of implementation, and response from support. Review documentation quality and how the platform handles errors, failovers, and edge cases.
7. Analyse pricing models. Understand whether the fee structure is transaction-based, tiered, or tied to a monthly licence. Some platforms may appear cheaper at first glance, but opaque pricing – like fees for every API call, charges on failed transactions, or taking a cut of your revenue – can quickly add up.
8. Plan for the long term. Look beyond launch. Assess the vendor’s product roadmap, release frequency, ability to adapt to your future use cases, and willingness to support customisations if needed.

Why buy?

Consider the trade-offs

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Build vs. Buy a payment orchestrator: a side-by-side breakdown

To help you clearly weigh the trade-offs between building and buying a payment orchestration platform, we’ve outlined the key differences side by side. This table breaks down the factors that matter most – from cost and speed to control and scalability – so you can make a decision that aligns with your priorities, resources, and growth stage.

So, build or buy? If you need full control over your payments stack and have the time, team, and budget to support it, building a POP in-house can give you unmatched flexibility and long-term ownership. But if you’re looking for a quick launch, predictable costs, and a much faster way to grow into new markets, buying is definitely the smarter move.

Hybrid & alternative approaches

Sometimes the best answer isn’t strictly build or buy – it’s a blend. Hybrid and alternative approaches offer flexibility when you're scaling, entering new markets, or working with varied product lines.

• Hybrid approach. Start with a third-party platform to cover your immediate needs and get to market fast, while gradually developing proprietary components in parallel. This allows you to validate your business model without a heavy upfront investment.
• Outsource the build. Hiring an external development partner can accelerate delivery if you plan to own the infrastructure long-term but lack internal resources. Choose teams with domain expertise in payments, compliance, and integration testing.
• Extend a vendor. Many orchestration platforms offer APIs and webhooks that let you build custom logic around them. This model works well if you want to tailor specific flows – like custom routing or loyalty triggers – without taking on full system ownership.

Risk factors to watch

Even with a clear strategy, some risks can derail both build and buy efforts, especially if underestimated.

• Lack of domain expertise. Payment orchestration involves compliance, real-time system architecture, complex provider behaviour, and region-specific logic. Without experience in payments, even simple decisions can turn into costly mistakes.
• Underestimating complexity. Integrating PSPs isn’t just API work. Each comes with its own logic, requirements, reporting quirks, and exception cases. Supporting edge cases and changes over time requires more effort than most teams expect.
• Lost opportunities during development. A 12–18 month build cycle could mean missing new markets, revenue opportunities, or competitive positioning, while others move faster with plug-and-play options.
• Compliance burden. Meeting regulatory compliance is a moving target. If it's not continuously tracked and enforced, it can lead to penalties or operational blocks.
• Ongoing product maintenance. Once live, orchestration platforms require regular updates: new providers, regulation changes, error handling, fraud rules, and uptime monitoring. If ownership isn't clearly planned, the platform can stagnate or create bottlenecks.
• Hidden costs post-launch. Whether you build or buy, plan for costs like PSP certifications, sandbox testing, multi-environment management, incident response, and ongoing support.
• Vendor lock-in risks. Relying on a third-party platform can make it harder to switch providers or pivot your payment architecture later. It's crucial to evaluate contract terms, exportability of data, and long-term flexibility.
• Limited roadmap control. With a vendor, you're dependent on their product roadmap and prioritisation. If you need custom logic or rapid adaptations, you may hit limits.
• Integration constraints. Some orchestrators may not support every PSP or feature out of the box, requiring workarounds or custom builds that reduce time-to-market advantages.

Your decision framework

Not sure where you fall? Use this simple framework to guide your choice:

Real-world cases

To see how payment orchestration works in practice, let’s explore how two very different companies used it to overcome key challenges and unlock growth.

Scaling a gambling business

Before partnering with Corefy, the company managed payments in-house using a team of developers and direct PSP integrations. Without PCI DSS certification, they couldn’t host card payments directly and relied on redirects to external PSP pages – a fragmented setup that created trust issues and hurt conversion rates. Their internal setup also demanded constant development effort to integrate new PSPs and maintain existing ones.

After switching to a ready-made POP, the company was able to:

• Launch a custom-branded payment page that aligns with their website to improve trust and boost conversions.
• Instantly access a pool of plug-and-play PSP integrations, cutting development time and enabling rapid expansion.
• Set up flexible routing and cascading rules to optimise payment success rates and reduce fraud.

The result: faster market entry, better customer experience, and lower operational complexity – all without building a platform from scratch.

Powering global growth for a cashback platform

Another case involves a fast-growing cashback platform – the largest in Eastern Europe – with millions of users and ambitious global expansion plans. As the business scaled, managing daily mass payouts and integrating new PSPs became a growing challenge for their internal team.

That’s where payment orchestration came in. With just one integration, they were able to:

• Send thousands of payouts daily without extra dev effort.
• Tap into dozens of ready-made PSP connections and request more when needed.
• Launch in new markets faster, including Spain, Germany, Poland, India, and Latin America.
• Grow their reach to 35+ countries in just four years.

Payment orchestration made it easier to scale, freeing up their team to focus on what really mattered – growing the business.

Final takeaways

So, where does that leave us?

Building your payment orchestration platform gives you total control and long-term flexibility, but it comes with significant investment, complexity, and maintenance overhead. It makes sense if payments are deeply tied to your product differentiation or business model.

For most businesses – especially those growing quickly or operating across multiple markets – buying is a smarter starting point. It gets you to market quickly, covers your compliance and routing needs out of the box, and frees up your internal team to focus on growth. A strong third-party solution can handle the heavy lifting while still giving you room to adapt, test, and scale.

And if your strategy evolves, hybrid models let you mix vendor agility with custom development, getting the best of both worlds as you grow.