Adding an Additional Payment Processor Shouldn’t Feel like Starting From Scratch

Every growing business hits this moment sooner or later.

You launched with one payment processor. It made sense at the time. One integration, one contract, one dashboard. 

Then the business grew, and the questions started piling up. Could we get better rates if a bank handled our card payments directly? Our customers in Southeast Asia keep dropping off at checkout, would local payment options fix that? And what happens to sales if our processor has a bad day?

Every one of these questions has the same answer: work with more payment partners. And every business that reaches this point discovers the same ugly truth. Adding a payment partner is a project. A big one.

The Hidden Cost of “Adding another Processor”

On paper, it sounds easy. Sign up with a new provider, plug them in, done.

In reality, here is what it usually involves. Your engineering team studies a new set of APIs and builds a fresh integration, which takes weeks or months depending on how deep your payment flows go. Your legal team negotiates a new contract. Your finance team learns a new settlement cycle and a new reconciliation format. Your ops team gets yet another dashboard login. And once it is all live, someone has to maintain that connection forever, because payment providers update their systems all the time.

It all adds up: the engineering hours, the onboarding cost and effort, the people involved with the integration, and the upkeep that never ends. 

For a growing company, the returns rarely justify what it costs to get there. The math simply doesn’t work, which is why so many businesses stay stuck on a single processor long after they have outgrown it.

We know this all too well. At Cashfree, we work with thousands of growing businesses, and we have watched them wrestle with this exact trade-off.

It’s the reason Gateway+ exists. And it solves all of it.

What is Gateway+?

Gateway+ is a capability within Cashfree PG that lets a business work with many payment partners through a single integration.

Here is the simplest way to picture it. Instead of building a separate pipe to every processor, bank, and international partner you want to work with, you build one pipe to Cashfree. Behind that pipe sits a network of payment partners: domestic processors, bank gateways, regional providers in other countries, and Merchant of Record partners for international sales.

Which partners handle your payments, and how much of your traffic each one gets, is entirely up to you. You could send card payments to a bank you have negotiated great rates with, while UPI flows elsewhere. You could go live in a new country using a local provider there, without your tech team touching the checkout or you could keep everything with one processor and hold another on standby for backup. 

And here is the part that matters most to your team: nothing changes on your side. 

– Your developers work with the same set of APIs.
– Your customers get a consistent checkout experience.
– and your team continues working from a single dashboard, with every transaction, settlement, refund, and reconciliation across all partners in one place.

New partners plug in behind the scenes through simple dashboard settings -no new integration, no code changes, and no disruption to your existing workflows.

Gateway+ already supports a wide set of partners out of the box: Payment processors like CCAvenue and PayU, banks from HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and Axis Bank, International providers like Stripe and Checkout.com, and Merchant of Record partners like Paddle and Lemon Squeezy. 

What This Actually Changes for a Business

You stop building and maintaining integrations. The connections to every partner in the network already exist, and Cashfree keeps them running. When a provider changes their APIs, that work never lands on your team. The months you would have spent wiring up a new processor go back into building your actual product.

You get real choices, down to the payment method. Most businesses accept whatever setup their provider gives them, because changing it is too much effort. Gateway+ flips that. You can decide which bank sits behind your card payments, which partner handles UPI, and which provider serves which market.

In addition, Gateway+ comes with a ready set of partner options already integrated and available to activate, so getting started is as simple as picking from the list. 

A processor outage stops being an emergency. When one partner has trouble, your payments can shift to another. Your checkout keeps working, your customers keep paying, and your team finds out from a report instead of a fire drill.

Selling abroad becomes genuinely local. International customers convert best when checkout feels like home: familiar payment methods, local currency, local processing. Through regional providers and Merchant of Record partners in the network, you can offer exactly that in your target markets, whether or not you have a company registered there. Your revenue still flows through the same single setup.

Where Gateway+ Fits Best

Three kinds of businesses that are best suited for the product:

The first is the growing domestic business that has real money moving through payments now. At their scale, redundancy matters, rates matter, and depending on a single processor starts to feel risky. They want options without a six-month engineering roadmap.

The second is the business with an entity abroad. They want to collect payments locally in that market through a regional provider, with a checkout that feels truly local to their customers there. But building and maintaining a direct integration with a foreign processor is cumbersome.

The third is the exporter selling internationally from India without a foreign entity. There are multiple blockers in this case: being authorised to sell in that geography, settling funds locally, and staying on top of local tax compliance and filings. That’s exactly what Merchant of Record partners solve. Through Gateway+, the MoR takes on that compliance work, and the exporter gets to sell in markets that would otherwise require setting up a local entity.

Frequently asked questions

What is Gateway+?

Gateway+ is a capability within Cashfree PG that lets a business work with multiple payment processors, bank gateways, and international partners through a single integration. Partners are activated through configuration on the dashboard, without new code.

Do I need a new integration for each payment partner?

No. That is the point of Gateway+. Cashfree already maintains the connections to partners in the network. You activate the ones you want from your dashboard, and your existing integration, checkout, and reporting stay as they are.

Can I choose different partners for different payment methods?

Yes. You can assign a specific bank or partner to cards, another to UPI, and so on. You can also split traffic across processors and adjust the split anytime from the dashboard.

Can Gateway+ help me accept payments in other countries?

Yes. Gateway+ connects you to regional payment providers and Merchant of Record partners in your target markets. That means local payment methods, local pricing, and in-country settlement for your international customers, with revenue flowing through your existing Cashfree integration. This works whether or not you have an entity registered abroad.

What happens if one of my processors goes down?

With more than one processor active, your payments can shift to another partner, so your checkout keeps working through an outage. You stay in control of how that traffic is divided.