Payment Orchestration Study Reveals Mid-Transformation Performance Valley

Most organisations treat digital transformation as a linear progression — adopt foundational tools, layer on advanced features, reap incremental gains. New research challenges that model.

The July edition of The Orchestration Advantage Series, a PYMNTS Intelligence study produced with Spreedly, reveals that businesses with three or four core orchestration capabilities sometimes lag behind firms operating just one or two.

The culprit is not inadequate technology. Rather, complexity builds faster than companies can absorb it. The riskiest phase of transformation may be the middle: significant investment without the governance, integration, or operating model to make disparate systems work together.

The PYMNTS Intelligence study surveyed 110 U.S. companies generating at least $10 million in annual revenue. Researchers examined adoption of five payment orchestration capabilities:

• Automated dynamic routing
• Frequent updates to routing logic
• Failover and redundancy
• Internal control over payment tokens
• Ability to connect with multiple payment service providers

The findings expose a stark performance valley. 78% of businesses operating all five capabilities reported transaction-completion gains of at least 2%. Only 7% of companies with one or two capabilities reached that threshold — but just 10% of companies with three or four capabilities did so.

For organisations in the middle group, customer-experience metrics often worsen before improving. 52% of companies with three or four capabilities reported that payment issues generated at least 5% of customer complaints.

These same businesses also saw elevated checkout abandonment, indicating that partially modernised payment environments can introduce new operational friction before delivering smoother customer journeys.

The data suggests transformation does not follow a staircase model. It looks more like a valley: firms must absorb additional complexity before the benefits of an integrated operating model materialise. This contradicts the widespread assumption that each new capability delivers a discrete return.

In enterprise transformation, technical debt extends well beyond software shortcuts. It encompasses duplicated workflows, manual reconciliation, brittle integrations, inconsistent data, overlapping vendor contracts, and controls designed for simpler environments.

The study's broader lesson is that orchestration should not be seen as the final stage of transformation. It is the discipline that allows every other stage to generate value.

In payments, orchestration coordinates processors, routing rules, tokens, retries, and backup paths. Across the broader enterprise, it coordinates data, applications, controls, people, and decision rights. Without that connective layer, every new capability becomes another object requiring monitoring and management.

Companies operating all five payment orchestration capabilities were 11 times as likely as those with only one or two to report checkout-conversion gains of at least 2%.

69% of full-stack adopters achieved payment approval rates above 97%, compared with 32% of the least mature companies.

Those gains do not appear to stem from the fifth capability alone. They emerge from the interaction among all five, underscoring the importance of reaching full integration before transformation delivers measurable returns.