EXCLUSIVE: “Paying in Perfect Harmony” – Thomas Gillan, BR-DGE in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Thomas Gillan from BR-DGE explains how orchestration focussed on optimisation benefits everyone in the payment chain

Gone are the days when merchants were held to restrictive, long-term contracts with monoline providers, often tied to the major banks and credit card companies, which held the monopoly and stifled choice. The past two decades have seen paytech innovation blow the doors wide open on payments, first to increased competition and choice, and now to a whole new level of sophistication, which means vendors can work with not just one but several payment service providers, operating together harmoniously through a single platform.

Hello to the new era of orchestration.

In this Q&A, Thomas Gillan, CEO of UK-based orchestration platform BR-DGE, one of the bigger players in this space, tells us how payment orchestration providers (POPs) are reaching critical mass. This looks set to transfer the balance of power back to merchants so they can satisfy consumers who are demanding ever-more sophisticated and seamless payment experiences.

Not only does this help merchants get the best deals, but it also removes go-to-market limitations in an increasingly global world. In essence, merchants can rely on orchestrators to create a bespoke solution that actually enables, rather than hinders their business aspirations.

Intelligent routing and management of payments across multiple gateways and processors without the merchant having to worry about how it all happens, could be key to an ambitious company. That said, careful management is required as adding another layer to payment stacks can also bring complexity and additional risk around contractual arrangements.

Gillan describes how BR-DGE’s modular approach means merchants can select additional safeguards proportionate to their risk, which artificial intelligence is helping to automate. And all of this can be beneficial for acquirers, too, he says. Traditionally viewing orchestrators as a competitive threat, acquirers are now recognising how they can enable them to overcome their legacy tech reliance and avoid disintermediation by utilising some of the white-labelled capabilities offered by the platforms.

In this way, they can create new opportunities for growth through expansion of their merchant services in an increasingly global trading environment where businesses need to operate across multiple geographies, verticals and channels.

The Fintech Magazine: The meaning of orchestration is still subject to interpretation. What do you believe it can deliver for merchants?

Thomas Gillan: Orchestration is getting a lot of coverage at the moment, and it’s important providers define what their version is so that people are clear what services they can provide and how they can add value. For me, it’s really important to talk about optimisation. That’s about both ensuring your customer, the end user of your checkout flow, is paying the way they want to pay in the least amount of clicks possible. But, critically to the merchant, it’s ensuring you capture every pound, dollar or euro that comes over your platform the first time of asking – whether through elevating authorisation and conversion rates, or just how you stitch together that payment flow to make sure you’re attracting and converting as much as possible from the basket into the bank.

“It’s always important to understand what the merchant is trying to achieve, because everyone has different priorities at different times”

Orchestration can also solve a lot of merchants’ problems and that’s a great opportunity for software providers because offering them new solutions continues to deepen your product. We major on the optimisation piece because, when orchestration started to come to the fore, some of the payment product providers and acquirers took a sharp intake of breath. All of a sudden it blew open the market and replaced their 100 per cent ownership of the customer, with a multi-acquirer strategy where you can say ‘these transactions here are better processed by this provider and, for these, we’re better with this other provider’.

In this way, it isn’t all just about cost and it’s really helped us build a stronger partner network because we can give partners distribution and access to the flows they’re best at acquiring. It’s always important to understand what the merchant is trying to achieve, because everyone has different priorities at different times. They might already be very highly optimised and want to focus more time on authorisation rates, for example. The great thing about orchestration is you can direct the payment flow at any stage.

In terms of authorisation, that might be to put in additional fraud checks, 3DS journeys, or route transactions to take advantage of certain exemptions with some acquirers and do it much smarter. This means it’s really important to work with the merchant and the client to understand where they want to leverage value, and almost go for the lowest-hanging fruit. That could be through a tokenisation strategy, which they can get through our vault, or through optimising new payment methods, local and alternative payment methods at the checkout. Or they might need to drive conversion through dynamic retries and resilience – it can be one, some or all of the above.

TFM: Why is modularity so important, when it comes to ensuring the best end-user experience?

TG: One of the things we found with orchestration very early on in our journey is that being able to stitch together so many vital parts of the payment ecosystem and solve so many different problems, can be quite overwhelming for merchants in knowing where to start, especially if they have multiple challenges they want to tackle.

So, we were very deliberate in making our offering modular and interoperable, so that customers can draw down certain things as individual services and then expand. For example, one of the really positive market developments we’ve seen is network tokenisation. We’re seeing big changes with the continued growth in e-commerce and online cardholder-not-present, but then it’s all about the security and making sure we’ve got a much more streamlined customer journey for the end consumer.

Network tokenisation has been amazing at delivering that, whether it’s keeping the cardholder details up-to-date or just increasing security on a merchant-by-merchant transaction level. This is why, for us, it’s been hugely important to offer it as a modular service that they can consume as a standalone and really add value from the beginning, while making sure we’re not just stopping there.

We’re always asking what other challenges we need to solve but thinking ‘let’s do it in an order that suits the merchant’.

TFM: Beyond the tools themselves, how crucial is access to expertise and support for the merchant-customer, and what additional possibilities could that unlock?

TG: I’m a big believer in the fact that any technology vendor should be able to be a sparring partner, capable of providing advice, support and constructive feedback as well, as organisations go through their growth journey. That’s especially true when scaling because payments infrastructure is complicated, but it’s the lifeblood of an organisation. Making sure the customer feels they have real support – not only someone at the end of the phone, but someone who has their back, is key. If you don’t get that right, you’re going to struggle to drive long-term value; and it’s why I talk about a more partner-led approach because there’s no one-size-fits-all.

In fact, this is how we’re going to start to see certain providers really break out – and there’s going to be a scale tipping point. Take us, for example. We’re a data company in payments in many respects, and we can only optimise, based on the data we’re seeing across the platform. So, our big focus has been on building volumes to be able to improve the optimisation decision-making we can provide. Over the next three to five years, we’re going to see a couple of providers reach that critical mass and really start to scale, based on the data sets they’re able to build.

Alongside security and tokenisation, data will be a key element of the payment journey. There’s also personalisation to the consumer, because it’s very easy to forget the actual end beneficiary is the consumer. They want to pay using the method they choose and have it as friction-free as possible.

We’re now starting to look at how to turn payments from hygiene factors into value drivers – by personalising the checkout journey so that someone lands in a checkout and can see the payment method they’d like to pay with or their last payment method. Then, you can build loyalty into that by providing certain payment methods linked to the status of the customer. That’s a fascinating piece that’s going to start to evolve and, for me, orchestration is the enabler to make that happen.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue 34, Page 40-41