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Cashfree Payments is now prioritizing direct integrations with merchants, moving away from partnerships with payment orchestration platforms. This change is part of our ongoing efforts to enhance compliance and provide an improved platform experience with the latest features. While this shift aims to strengthen the overall ecosystem, it will require some of the merchants to make adjustments to align with the new landscape. We are fully committed to ensuring a smooth transition and equipping merchants with the necessary tools and support to adapt seamlessly. Below, we share some insights on how this change will impact merchants and what steps can be taken moving forward
How orchestrators work
When a merchant initiates a payment, the request is first sent to the payment orchestrator, which acts as an intermediary layer hosted on third-party servers. The orchestrator applies routing logic to direct the payment to the appropriate payment aggregator based on predefined rules. These rules are optimized for factors such as payment success rates, cost efficiency, and overall system performance, ensuring that the transaction is processed in the most effective way possible.
Payment aggregators are increasingly moving away from supporting intermediate orchestrators due to concerns around compliance and user experience. Some of the simplest yet significant issues are that
- Often delays in adopting new innovative payment features due to the involvement of multiple parties in the integration process required for the go-live.
- Payment aggregators may not be able to identify the originating website of a transaction, which introduces potential security/compliance risks
- An increased number of hops and screens involved in the transaction flow can lead to higher latencies, further complicating the payment process and negatively impacting the user experience.
Given these recent developments in the industry, merchants now need to seek alternative solutions to stay competitive and adapt to the changing ecosystem. The ideal solution would be to directly integrate with Cashfree Payments. However, for use cases where merchants require an orchestrator, the best approach would be for them to build and deploy their own payment orchestrator within their cloud environment. Still, this is not a core business function that most merchants wish to focus on. Managing the complexities of integrating with various payment partners and banks while ensuring compliance and security in an ever-evolving environment is far from straightforward. This challenge requires expertise and resources that many businesses may prefer to allocate elsewhere
Cloud Native flowWise
At Cashfree, we’ve always been at the forefront of developing innovative solutions that deliver real business value to our merchants. To address this orchestrator need, we offer not only a SaaS-based payment orchestrator but also a Cloud Native Payment Orchestrator, designed to be hosted directly within the merchant’s environment. This solution simplifies the management of multiple payment partners by consolidating them into a single platform. Not only does it enhance the customer experience by ensuring smooth, uninterrupted transactions, but it also reduces operational overhead for merchants—allowing them to focus on their business growth rather than navigating complex payment systems.
Cashfree Payments Cloud Native Orchestrator empowers merchants to provide a seamless, efficient, and highly secure payment experience, all while driving down operational costs.
How We Delight Our Merchants
- Full Control and Flexibility: The product is hosted in the merchant’s own data centre, giving them complete control over scaling, data confidentiality, and orchestration.
- Seamless Integrations: Out-of-the-box integrations with major payment aggregators, gateways, and banks make setup quick and easy.
- Optimized Routing: Advanced, configurable routing capabilities help merchants optimize for both cost and success rates, ensuring efficient payment processing.
- Comprehensive Merchant Tools: Our platform equips merchants with powerful tools to manage payment methods, handle refunds, and streamline bank reconciliations, improving operational efficiency and analytics.
With these features, we ensure that our merchants have everything they need to succeed in a fast-evolving payment ecosystem.
Our Core Focus Areas
Integrations
Our platform offers default integrations with leading payment aggregators, banks, and partners, all extensively validated with real payment traffic at a global scale. Additionally, we provide a pluggable architecture that allows seamless integration, not just by the Cashfree team but also by enabling merchants to easily add or switch payment partners as needed. This flexibility ensures that our merchants can scale and adapt their payment systems effortlessly.
Cloud Native Solution
Cashfree’s comprehensive payments solution is built to be deployed in the merchant’s own cloud, giving them full control over routing, access, and data. The platform comes with built-in libraries and plugins that streamline monitoring, offering deep visibility into logs, events, and system metrics for enhanced observability and effective management. Cashfree ensures timely and seamless updates, including the addition of new payment methods and platform upgrades. This cloud-native approach not only minimizes the number of hops in a transaction but also provides merchants to
- Maintain complete oversight while enjoying seamless, real-time insights into their payment operations.
- Eliminate the need for a checkout URL on checkout.pa.com, it will be your.domain.com
- Scale payment systems according to the business needs.
- Costs no longer directly tied to transaction value.
Payment Routing
Our payment orchestration allows merchants to configure routing with rules based on various variables. The pluggable framework that can incorporate code written by merchants or merchant-defined rules enables smarter routing strategies that optimize for payment success, reduce costs, and enhance the overall customer experience. This level of customization ensures that every transaction is processed in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible.
Seamless Checkout Experience
Our solution offers both frontend and backend integrations through SDKs, ensuring a smooth, unified checkout process. The checkout flow is designed to be intuitive and personalized, with a focus on improving customer experience and driving higher conversion rates. Merchants can customize the checkout to match their design guidelines. This helps merchants offer a seamless, frictionless transaction experience that keeps customers engaged and encourages them to complete their purchases.
Secure Payments
All transactions and data are fully secured, both in transit and at rest, within the merchant’s own cloud environment. Merchants also have the flexibility to integrate with their preferred PCI DSS-compliant vault, ensuring safe and secure storage of card details. They can connect to different risk engine providers if one does not want to use Cashfree’s risk shield. This robust security framework protects sensitive information while giving merchants complete control over their payment data.
Simplified Payment Operations
Our platform offers a single, easy-to-use interface that consolidates all payment partners, allowing merchants to manage critical operations—such as settlements, risk, refunds, disputes, real-time reconciliation like three-way reconciliations, two-way reconciliations, and one comprehensive place for all your reports in your database—effortlessly. Merchants can control data access using RBAC. This streamlined approach reduces the complexity of handling multiple systems and ensures that merchants can stay on top of their payment operations in real-time.
This payment technology is designed to empower merchants to seamlessly integrate with all payment providers, giving them complete control and confidence in their operations. What sets it apart is that it’s developed by Cashfree, a trusted payment aggregator, but deployed and fully managed by the merchant in their own cloud environment. This unique combination ensures both flexibility and security for optimal payment management.
