GBC Time has interviewed — Viktoriia Degtiarova, CCO & Co-founder at Paysecure, a technology payment company that helps online businesses and payment institutions optimize their payments and customer experience through intelligent routing and risk management.
Why is payment orchestration becoming a critical layer in the fintech stack today, and what makes it so essential for businesses operating at scale?
Payment orchestration has become a foundational component of the modern fintech infrastructure, driven by the escalating complexity of global commerce and the imperative for agile, scalable payment systems. Orchestration has a critical role in addressing the multifaceted challenges of contemporary payment ecosystems.
Other models like legacy payment setups often lack the flexibility and responsiveness required in today’s dynamic market. They can be cumbersome to update, integrate, and scale, leading to inefficiencies and increased operational costs.
In contrast, the payment orchestration model offers a more adaptable and scalable solution. By leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and modular architectures, orchestration platforms enable businesses to seamlessly integrate multiple payment providers, adapt to regional compliance requirements, and swiftly incorporate emerging payment technologies.
For instance, a merchant operating across multiple countries can utilize an orchestration platform to dynamically route transactions through the most efficient payment gateways, optimizing for factors like cost, speed, and success rates. This level of agility is challenging to achieve with traditional systems, which often require significant time and resources to implement similar capabilities.
Orchestration platforms facilitate real-time analytics and monitoring, providing businesses with actionable insights into transaction performance and customer behavior. This data-driven approach allows for continuous optimization of payment strategies, enhancing customer experience and increasing conversion rates.
The shift towards payment orchestration is a strategic response to the demands of our digital economy. It offers businesses the tools to navigate the complexities of global payments with greater efficiency, flexibility, and insight.
What are the biggest operational and strategic challenges businesses face when managing fragmented, multi-provider payment setups across different regions and verticals?
The primary challenge in managing a fragmented, multi-provider payment environment is lack of visibility and control. As businesses expand across geographies, they often onboard multiple local PSPs, acquirers, and alternative payment methods to improve authorization rates and meet consumer preferences. However, this diversification introduces silos: each provider comes with its own routing and reporting logic, settlements, risk models, and performance standards, making it nearly impossible to maintain a centralized view of payment performance or customer behavior.
From an operational standpoint, reconciling data across providers becomes a manual, error-prone process. Merchants may spend entire teams’ worth of resources consolidating fragmented reports just to understand their true cost of payments, let alone optimize it. According to research, 57% of European C-suite leaders identified “data fragmentation” as the primary barrier to effective decision-making within their organizations.
Strategically, this fragmentation impairs agility. Adding a new provider or replacing a failing one often requires custom development, weeks of integration work, and internal IT dependencies. In high-growth industries like eCommerce or iGaming where milliseconds and micro-decisions affect conversion, this lack of flexibility is a liability.
Another growing concern is regulatory compliance and local requirements. For instance, in markets like India, Brazil, or the EU, providers must comply with evolving local schemes (e.g., Pix, UPI, SEPA) and data residency laws. Without a centralized orchestration layer, adapting to these changes across multiple PSPs can become a legal and technical minefield.
There’s also conversion leakage due to inconsistent retry logic, lack of smart routing, and absence of unified risk management. A failed transaction routed through a single acquirer with no failover plan is often a lost sale. A global business relying on fragmented PSPs is leaving revenue on the table daily.
Fragmented payment setups limit insight, agility, scalability, and revenue optimization. Orchestration platforms solve this by providing a unified control layer, aggregating providers, harmonizing data, and enabling centralized decisioning across regions and verticals.
How does Paysecure’s orchestration platform differ from traditional gateways or standalone payment processors?
Traditional gateways and processors operate within closed ecosystems. They route transactions to a limited set of acquirers (often their own) and offer minimal flexibility beyond basic processing. Paysecure’s orchestration platform acts as an independent control layer that connects, manages, and optimizes hundreds of gateways, acquirers, and risk tools from a single interface.
The core difference lies in merchant autonomy and control. With a legacy gateway, the merchant plays by the provider’s rules: limited routing options, no transparency into transaction performance across partners, and little leverage to adapt. Paysecure puts the merchant in the driver’s seat. We give full access to smart routing logic, cascading retries, provider prioritization by geography or BIN, and real-time processing across PSPs. None of which are available in most standalone processors.
Take a merchant processing in Europe, for example. With a traditional gateway, they’re forced to use whatever acquirer that gateway partners with, regardless of local performance. With Paysecure, they can simultaneously route SEPA payments through a preferred EU provider, all while tracking conversion, cost, and fraud signals in one dashboard.
Another aspect that sets Paysecure apart is our ability to uncover and eliminate hidden payment processing fees. These fees often go unnoticed when merchants work with a single provider or lack full visibility across multiple PSPs. Our robust algorithm continuously analyzes transaction-level data to detect cost inefficiencies, such as unnecessary crossborder charges, suboptimal currency conversions, or markups added by intermediaries.
Once these hidden costs are identified, our platform dynamically routes each transaction to the most cost-effective provider in real time. By combining intelligent routing with fee transparency, merchants can reduce processing costs without sacrificing approval rates or performance. This kind of precision is simply not possible with static, one-size-fits-all gateway setups.
We also offer a Trust Score system that evaluates transactions in real time using multiple signals, not just the binary fraud flag from a single PSP. It assigns a dynamic trust score to every transaction, assessing whether it’s legit, fraudulent or potentially risky.
Based on that score, we make intelligent decisions, such as declining confirmed fraud, approving trusted transactions, or applying adaptive actions like 3DS. Again, based on the trust level and data we gather, our system reroutes transactions to alternative MIDs or with another provider. This level of nuanced, trust-based decision-making is unique to our platform. Gateways simply don’t have the logic or flexibility to do that, but they pass or fail based on static rules.
Paysecure is not just a connector. We’re an orchestration layer that enables choice, performance optimization, and resilience. Traditional gateways move payments. We move them intelligently.
What advanced capabilities make Paysecure stand out?
Merchants operating across multiple markets need precision, flexibility, and control, not just a payment processor. That’s where Paysecure delivers.
Our orchestration platform is built to handle complexity at scale. At its core is a smart routing engine that dynamically directs transactions based on custom business rules; whether the goal is higher authorization rates, lower processing fees, reduced fraud, or all of the above.
One of our most powerful advantages lies in how we manage scale. For merchants handling large volumes, massive traffic or operating across regions, we provide ready-made integrations with leading acquirers. Through our established partnerships with major acquirers like Worldpay or DECTA, amongst others, we can open accounts on behalf of the merchant. The client completes just one KYB with Paysecure, and we handle the rest: onboarding, documentation, and access to multiple Tier-1 providers across channels. This dramatically reduces time-to-market and removes the operational burden from the merchant’s shoulders.
Security is equally embedded. Our integrated fraud prevention tools reduce fraud-related losses by over 10%, without sacrificing conversion. Chargebacks are another critical pain point, especially in high-risk industries where even a 1% ratio can trigger penalties or account closures. Our advanced algorithms actively monitor transaction patterns and behaviors to keep chargeback ratios consistently below 0.2%, protecting both revenue and merchant reputation.
Our platform enables seamless reconciliation and settlement workflows. Whether it’s across different countries, currencies, or payment brands, our system centralizes data from various providers, enabling automated reconciliation and reducing manual errors. Our modules are built for operations teams to handle complex needs efficiently, while settlement reports are generated automatically, and all transaction-level details are visible within a single dashboard. This ensures faster closing cycles, fewer discrepancies, and full financial oversight.
We also have the cashier feature, which is fully configurable and tailored to optimize performance in each target market. Using transactional and behavioral data, we enable merchants to deliver a localized experience that improves conversion and reduces drop-offs. Features like One-Click Deposit streamline the flow for returning users, while Dynamic Currency Conversion, powered by live XE.com rates, ensures pricing transparency across regions. Merchants can define pre-set deposit amounts based on country or currency and display real-time promotions directly within the cashier to boost engagement.
Beyond customization, the cashier is designed to be smart and responsive. Payment method suggestions are triggered automatically if a transaction fails, using BIN and historical data to propose the next best option. Merchants can apply tier-based visibility rules, tailor language and branding, or enforce region-specific conditions, all from a central UI. The design is mobile-first, supports sandbox testing, and includes advanced use cases like recurring payments or U.S. tax compliance, making it a strategic asset for driving deposits and retaining users across markets.
What role do your intelligent routing strategies such as cascading, retries, and failover mechanisms play in optimizing approval rates and what value do they bring to merchants?
We give merchants complete control over their routing logic. Want to prioritize low-cost acquirers in one region while optimizing for conversion in another? You can. Want to automatically shift volume away from underperforming providers in real time? Done. This type of customization translates into measurable value:
- Up to 5% decrease in processing costs by routing through the most cost-effective PSPs.
- Up to 10% increase in conversion rates, thanks to real-time optimization and traffic segmentation.
- Up to 12% lift in approvals through smarter routing based on issuer performance, region, and transaction type.
In high-traffic environments, our platform supports auto-retries and cascading logic, automatically recovering up to 10% of transactions lost due to acquirer downtimes – a capability traditional systems can’t match. With auto-scaling infrastructure, Paysecure processes over 340,000 requests per second, maintaining uptime and performance during peak demand, whether that’s Black Friday, a global gaming launch, or a flash sale.
What we offer is business optimization at the transaction level. Every decision our platform makes is designed to extract more value from each payment, giving our merchants a tangible competitive edge in high-stakes, high-volume environments.
Viktoriia Degtiarova
Viktoriia Degtiarova, the CCO & Co-Founder at Paysecure, is a seasoned marketer with over 10 years of international expertise, predominantly within the dynamic digital gaming industry. With a notable track record in leadership positions at LeoVegas Group, PokerStars, and Genius Sports Group, Viktoriia is passionate about introducing innovative products to the market and driving their reach across diverse geographies, languages, and cultures. Her expertise extends to various project-based initiatives, including crafting go-to-market strategies, developing business plans for media brands entering the iGaming space, and successfully managing fundraising efforts for an eSports startup. Known for her adeptness in orchestrating omnichannel marketing campaigns, Viktoriia continues to drive innovation and success in digital marketing.
About Paysecure
Paysecure is a powerful AI & rules-driven orchestration platform and cashier built with the latest innovative tech, that allows merchants to provide tailored solutions for their end-customers. With one simple integration, merchants can have instant access to a global payments ecosystem, seamlessly connecting with both local and international PSPs and acquirers.
The company’s mission is to deliver the world’s leading orchestration platform, empowering businesses across diverse industries to enhance the end-user experience, while lowering transaction costs, expanding payment options, upholding top-tier security, and scaling effortlessly.
