Challenges PSPs Face When Integrating Multiple Payment Gateways
Payment Service Providers (PSPs) face significant challenges when integrating multiple payment gateways, despite the advantages of diversifying consumer options, expanding market reach, and enhancing user experience. These are the challenges that other PSPs tend to face when employing such strategies.
Technical Integration and System Complexity
Payment Service Providers (PSPs) that integrate with multiple payment gateways must deal with a variety of APIs, documentation standards, and communication protocols. Each separate gateway operates on its exclusively developed system. Thus, the overall payment processing system becomes overly complicated and prone to dysfunction with extensive requirements and tailored development. This also places a major burden on IT resources pressure.
Operational Management and Administrative Load
A complicated web of vendor relationships. Multiple gateways mean multiple vendors to manage, each with separate service level expectations, and separate performance monitoring. Managing these relationships is a time-consuming undertaking and often requires an in-house team to operate daily, interface with each provider, and track performance.
Financial Strain and Cost Implications
The costs increase exponentially when two or more different payment types are used. Gateways charge different integration fees, transaction fees, and ongoing support costs. The incremental costs add up across systems, adding strain to operational budgets and reducing margins—particularly with providers who operate on minuscule profit margins and little financial flexibility.
Data Fragmentation and Reporting Difficulties
Routing transactions through disconnected systems results in inconsistent data formats among systems. Collating that information into one comprehensive overview is an arduous—with high potential for error—effort that challenges not only real-time visibility but long-term analytics as well.
Security, Compliance, and Customer Experience
Multi-gateway compliance is tricky. Security protocols like PCI DSS vary; KYC and AML requirements are regional compliance standards. Beyond this, different integrations and different user flows create checkout process friction instead of the transparency and ease of use that should be offered during payment.