Best-of-Breed Payment Stacks Require Open Payments

You cannot achieve truly optimized payments through one lone vendor. 

It’s just not possible. 

No singular payment provider can offer the global coverage and services your company needs. Instead, building a best-of-breed payment infrastructure enables you to build a modular stack of payment services comprised of a wide selection of providers and designed to meet your exact needs. 

At Spreedly, we believe an open payments platform is the key to achieving a flexible and diverse payment stack that can leverage multiple providers without becoming vendor-locked. 

First Things First, What is Best-of-Breed?

A best-of-breed software stack involves the use of distinct software products from a range of different vendors. Each product within the stack offers key benefits for specific business functions. In the context of payments, this can include tasks like payment processing and fraud prevention.

Establishing a best-of-breed payment stack requires one of two methods:

1. Building your payment infrastructure and platform in-house
2. Leveraging a vendor-agnostic platform that enables integrations from multiple providers

How an Open Payments Platform Enables a Best-of-Breed Payment Stack

An open payments platform offers a strategic alternative to either relying on a single vendor or having to build a best-of-breed payment stack in-house. 

Building from the concepts born from open banking and payment orchestration, open payments technology gives you the ability to connect with not only a multitude of providers but also your customers’ financial accounts, giving you a deeper understanding of who they are and their specific preferences. 

Open payments enable four key components of a best-of-breed payment stack:

1. Competitive PSP Landscapes

Why choose just one payment service provider (PSP) if you don’t have to? 

An open payments platform gives you the opportunity to engage with as many or as few PSPs as you prefer. While other platform solutions may claim to offer diverse software integration options, Spreedly’s open payments platform is the only one capable of true openness.  

Rather than committing to one or two vendors, open payments allow you to leverage the best PSPs currently on the market. Considering the increasing level of competition across the provider landscape, this ensures you can swiftly integrate new products or services without worrying about potential impacts on your relationships with your other vendors. 

2. Optimization Services

When dealing with payments, you need the ability to optimize them to the fullest extent. 

Open payments facilitate connections with as many optimization services as you need, including multiple payment processors and payment gateways. 

The flexibility to integrate different processors and gateways into your technical environment can then further streamline your payment infrastructure by routing each individual transaction through the services with the highest chance of success. If you handle both domestic and international payments, an open payments platform can enable you to route transactions through localized services.

For example, Spreedly’s open payments platform offers intelligent payment routing, which can automatically re-route a transaction to a different payment gateway or processor if the payment initially fails. This not only improves overall transaction speed but also helps maintain high authorization rates, keeping your customers happy and your cash flow steady. 

3. Open Banking & Identity Verification

Open banking encompasses a variety of global regulatory initiatives aimed at increasing financial transparency in both the B2B and B2C sectors. The growth in prevalence of open banking  technologies has opened up new avenues for businesses to access vital information about customers, such as their financial habits and preferred payment methods. In addition to financial transparency and data, open banking can encompass alternate banking rails that provide instant payment capabilities as well. 

 These capabilities allow open banking to play an increasingly important role in improving identity verification processes by allowing businesses to cross-check customers’ financial information in real-time. 

Open payments builds on the concepts of standardized and flexible capabilities from open banking, with the overarching goal of creating a more connected and visible payments environment. Along with giving you new insights into your customers, an open payments platform can also integrate essential open banking technologies that enhance identity verification processes in terms of both speed and accuracy. 

4. Wallets & Alternative Payment Methods

Relying on a single vendor can significantly limit the number of payment methods you can connect to your payment stack. Likewise, building a best-of-breed payment stack in-house can make it complicated to manage a growing pool of alternative payment methods and wallet integrations.

Comparatively, an open payments platform gives you the pre-built infrastructure you need to efficiently integrate all the payment methods you need, including digital wallets and other more modern options. You can customize your payment stack according to the exact preferences of your customers, partners, and suppliers, all while maintaining the operational flexibility to add new methods as needed. 

Liberate Yourself From Closed Payment Ecosystems with Spreedly

As the largest player in the payment orchestration space, Spreedly is inviting you to join us in taking the leap towards truly open payments. Through our low-to-no-code platform, you gain exceptional connectivity to all the payment services you need through one central, fully optimized platform. 

With Spreedly, you can lead your business above and beyond best-of-breed to establish a highly adaptable payment stack and drive global payment performance.

Contact Spreedly today to free yourself of the burden of closed payment systems. 

Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below