Practical guide from Monoup on how to connect your business to payment orchestrator
Configuring payment flows is no simple task — it often lingers in the development backlog. When the number of payment systems grows, the idea of using an aggregator starts to look appealing. While it may seem like a perfect solution (as you’ll have a single entity responsible for your entire payment infrastructure), transitioning to a new system can quickly turn into an operational nightmare.
On one hand, working with each payment service provider (PSP) separately — each with its own API, logic, and patchwork of solutions — makes switching to an aggregator look like an easy fix for all problems. A payment aggregator or orchestrator offers a unified API and a convenient admin panel, but it also introduces many nuances and limitations that are important to know in advance.
At the end of the day, scaling a business without your own infrastructure inevitably leads to aggregation. However, migrating to a payment orchestration platform is rarely a “plug-and-play” solution. It’s a project that needs careful planning; otherwise, instead of improvements, you risk losing transactions and facing months of headaches.
Let’s break down when it’s time to migrate and how to do it without compromising quality.
When to Switch to Payment Orchestrator
Making such a fundamental decision isn’t easy, but it should be based on real business needs — not just the desire to work with someone new. At certain stages of product growth, consolidating payment flows becomes unavoidable, but sometimes it’s just an unnecessary complication that won’t deliver the expected benefits. We recommend approaching this one comprehensively and looking not only at your processing volumes but also at their complexity: how many countries you cover, how many payment methods you support, and what technical or strategic challenges a payment aggregator can help you to resolve. This is just as much a business decision as entering a new market or launching a new product.
The first sign that it is time shows up when payments start costing you more than they bring in. When your routing has turned into a mess of half-solutions that are impossible to manage effectively. Initially, you planned one thing, but the result led to something else, and the entire system is held together by quick fixes developed to cease fires.
The next factor is when you can’t quickly respond to problems and are afraid to make changes for fear of crashing the entire system. The structure is so fragmented that consolidating it into a single organism is extremely difficult, and, moreover is unclear how to do so effectively.
Finally, you’ve outgrown your current system in terms of volume. When you processed a small number of transactions per month, basic routing worked well enough, managing one or two payment systems. But now, with millions of incoming payments, multiple major regions, and local currencies, all of this needs to be organized into a clear structure. However, you don’t necessarily need to connect to an external aggregator — many companies choose to develop their own system and improve what they’ve already built internally. That said, this option is only available to large projects with the time and resources for serious development and testing. If the goal is to go live quickly, solve accumulated problems, and use a proven industry solution, an external aggregation service is the best fit.
Migration Process: How to Do It Right
Migrating to an orchestrator isn’t just about flipping a switch and having everything ready by tomorrow. It’s a few months project that must be done step-by-step to preserve existing developments and genuinely improve payment structure rather than complicate it.
Let’s break it down:
Step 1: Initial Audit
First, you need to determine your needs and what’s already in place. Which payment systems are connected? Which payment methods are used? How do they work? Do you plan to change them, or do you want to keep the current structure but make it more technologically advanced?
It’s important to conduct this audit thoroughly — not just in a five-minute conversation or a one-hour call with the team. Allocate enough time to document everything in detail. Clear diagrams of the current processing setup for developers and product specialists will be useful for future reference.
Additionally, audit current performance and metrics. What is your conversion rate for each provider by method and region? What is the cost per transaction? What issues do you see at the first place? Often, this stage reveals additional gaps that may have been overlooked during day-to-day operations. The decision to switch to an orchestrator should be justified not just by desire but by real ROI metrics: How will this help the business? Where can you save money? What can be improved, and how?
Step 2: Platform Selection and Contract Signing
Once the picture is clear, you can move on to selecting a platform. Today, the market offers various options — from well-known solutions like Spreedly or Primer to orchestrators from major providers or niche custom solutions.
Define your selection criteria based on the audit conducted earlier. What’s most important for your company? Is it support for major PSPs, routing flexibility, API capabilities, analytics, or cost? These factors will shape the profile of your ideal (or near-ideal) aggregator that meets these requirements. Keep in mind that having pre-built integrations often saves money at the start — if your current payment systems are already available on the aggregator, no additional integrations are needed. However, if your payment systems are niche and need to be integrated specifically for you, this will likely incur extra costs. Include this cost in your launch budget to avoid surprises after signing the contract.
After selection and negotiations, configure the platform. Connect all necessary PSPs to the orchestrator, set up configurations, and run tests. This can take 2–4 weeks, depending on the number of providers. At this stage, you’re not changing anything on the website — just preparing the infrastructure.
Step 3: Parallel Launch
Once the orchestrator is set up, don’t rush to switch all traffic to it. First, launch it in test mode, where all transactions go through the old system, while a small segment of the market or a small percentage of the customer base uses the new one.
When you’re confident that everything is working smoothly, gradually transition the new system to real traffic. Start with 1–5% of transactions and partial payment methods, continuously assessing performance. Don’t pull the plug and switch to the new system overnight — the smoother the transition, the higher the chance it will go without issues and remain unnoticed by users.
At every stage, you should be able to quickly revert to the old system if something goes wrong. It continues to operate until you’ve transitioned 100% of the traffic and confirmed that everything is stable.
Step 4: Migration and Optimization
Once all traffic is flowing through the orchestrator and it has been operating smoothly for several weeks, you can consider the main migration complete.
But the work doesn’t end there — now you have a tool that needs to be used correctly. This is where you can build analytics and optimize based on real data, test new providers without risk, and improve payment flows. This is an ongoing process that delivers the core value of an orchestrator: ability to experiment and manage all payments from a single dashboard, saving time and resources.
Conclusion
Migrating to a payment orchestration platform isn’t a quick fix — it’s months of active work for an entire team. But if done correctly — step by step, with testing and a gradual transition — the risks are minimal, and the benefits prevail. You gain flexibility in working with providers, centralized analytics, the ability to respond quickly to issues, and save time that would otherwise be spent integrating all providers independently or making routine changes.
If you need help planning or executing this transition, feel free to reach out — we’re here to assist!
