Payments leaders tell us they face mounting pressure from multiple directions: unexpected payments outages during key shopping periods; the need to expand into emerging markets to reach new customers; and rising payments costs, such as higher network fees and the increasing overhead of managing fraud.

As a result, large businesses are adding multiple payment providers to ensure redundancy, increase reach, and improve payments performance. In fact, according to 451 Research, 62% of enterprises prefer to work with multiple payment providers to process transactions.

However, adding and managing additional providers is complex and resource-intensive, often requiring new software tools or significant engineering resources to integrate directly with each processor, create and update routing logic, and build a unified view of performance.

This guide provides an overview of how to assess and identify any gaps in your current payments infrastructure, how to appropriately resource your team to manage more than one payment provider, and how Stripe can help.

Should you adopt another payment provider? Questions to ask

The two most common reasons enterprises tell us they add another payment provider is global coverage and reliability. Evaluating these two key areas will help you assess your existing capabilities and explore where additional payment providers could advance your business strategy. Here are some questions to help identify gaps in your existing system.

Global coverage

• In which markets does your payment provider offer local acquiring?
  
• Which presentment currencies are offered and in which markets? Which settlement currencies?
  
• Does your payment provider offer an optimized checkout experience that localizes for language, local currency and pricing, and popular payment methods?
  
• Is there additional development effort required on your end to support a new payment method?
  
• Does your payment provider offer a unified view of all payments, including diverse local payment methods?
  

Reliability and PCI compliance

• In which markets does your payment provider directly connect to card networks?
  
• Do you experience outages with your current payments infrastructure?
  
• What is the opportunity cost of those outages (missed sales, reduced customer trust, etc.)?
  
• What is your acceptable amount of downtime?
  
• Is your provider able to scale to your volume and handle peak events?
  
• Does your provider publish its uptime and offer a transparent view of real-time platform health metrics?
  
• Do you manage PCI-sensitive data such as raw PANs in-house today? Do you plan to outsource that to a third-party payment provider or use a dedicated solution?
  

Assessing the resources required to add another payment provider

If adding another payment provider makes sense for your business, the next step is understanding the full investment required. This includes engineering resources, operational changes, and strategic considerations that will help you plan effectively and set realistic expectations. Here are a few areas to consider.

Engineering resources

• Expect 6–18 months of dedicated engineering time for initial integration, which includes designing and implementing routing logic, integrating with each processor, creating testing frameworks across systems, and more.
  
• Plan for ongoing maintenance to keep integrations current with processor updates, test new features across all providers before they launch, and maintain compatibility.
  

Operational resources

• Give finance teams the ability to reconcile across multiple systems with different reporting formats and aggregate reporting across processors.
  
• Provide support teams with training and access to multiple dashboards and processes, tools to route inquiries to the correct system, and escalation paths for complex multiprocessor issues.
  
• Enable legal teams to handle contract negotiations and ongoing management across providers.
  
• Ensure that vendor managers can coordinate multiple business relationships and manage user accounts and user access across platforms.
  

Strategic considerations

• Determine how you will store and manage card data across multiple providers (with an in-house vault, third-party vault provider, or dual tokenization).
  
• Allocate engineering resources to build and maintain your card vaulting strategy.
  
• Identify acceptable latency for payment requests.
  
• Consider what core product development you might need to deprioritize.
  
• Evaluate how this investment aligns with your company’s primary strategic objectives.
  

How an orchestrator can help manage the complexity of multiple payment providers

While using multiple payment providers can improve payments performance or lower costs for some transactions, it often creates extra complexity. If you do not have a dedicated, sophisticated in-house payments team to manage this, or if you want to free up internal resources, you might look to an orchestrator.

Orchestrators can make it easier for you to optimize payments routing, monitor performance, and enter new markets without investing significant engineering, operational, and partnership resources to integrate and manage multiple payment providers. However, evaluate your risk appetite for potential increased latency and downtime: adding another provider to your payments stack could create another potential point of failure.

How Stripe can help

Businesses such as DoorDash and Twilio use Stripe’s modular financial infrastructure with multiple payment processors today. With Stripe, you can unify your checkout experiences across channels, manage subscription payments, and fight fraud regardless of where a payment is processed—all backed by Stripe’s industry-leading reliability.

Stripe helps you navigate using multiple payment processors in two ways within your existing Stripe integration: you can streamline your multiprocessor setup with Stripe Orchestration and you can use our dedicated financial solutions—such as fraud prevention and subscription billing—for payments processed outside of Stripe.

Streamline multiprocessor management with Orchestration
Orchestration allows you to easily manage multiple payment processors, synchronize data across them, and optimize their performance directly from the Stripe Dashboard. You can:

• Onboard quickly with a one-line code change and built-in access to direct payment providers
  
• Create routing logic and easily update it over time to hit business goals
  
• Instantly retry failed payments across chosen processors to reduce the risk of lost sales
  
• Compare payments performance across all processors, and even drill down into performance by processor based on card brand, country, and more
  

Use Stripe’s best-in-class financial products regardless of where a payment is processed
You’ve been asking us to make Stripe more modular so that our services fit better with your existing technology stack. Over the last few years, we’ve made many Stripe services work with other payment service providers. You can now:

• Use a consolidated UI optimized for conversion with the Optimized Checkout Suite—while flexibly routing payments to other processors
  
• Build and iterate on your ideal business models by streamlining subscription payments made with off-Stripe payment processors via Stripe Billing
  
• Authenticate with 3D Secure on Stripe and authorize the payment with another processor
  
• Fight fraud with Stripe Radar by using Stripe’s AI-powered risk scores and recommended actions on transactions processed by other payment providers
  

To learn more about how Stripe can help you manage multiple payment processors, contact our sales team.