Firms Tap Orchestration to Tame Chaos of Too Many Payment Options

Modern commerce has never offered customers more ways to pay or get paid.

From cards, ACH, wires, real-time payments, wallets, cryptocurrency and cross-border rails, the menu keeps expanding.

For merchants and platforms, that optionality is a competitive requirement. It is also, increasingly, an operational drag.

“I call it doing empty work; it’s like eating empty calories,” Priority Chief Strategy Officer Sean Kiewiet told PYMNTS. “These systems are not connected, but they all have to work together.”

The sprawling constellation of providers, banks, ledgers, treasury tools and risk systems has created what many finance leaders now experience as fragmentation. Duplicated workflows, mismatched settlement clocks, inconsistent risk signals and brittle integrations siphon time from product teams and cash from profits and losses.

“You have a person or a team of people that end up orchestrating … all the different systems,” Kiewiet said. “It’s not efficient … but it’s necessary.”

The consequences are tangible. One processor funds at 7 p.m. the same day; another settles the next morning; a treasury portal posts balances on a different cadence; payouts can sit in approval queues over a long weekend. The inefficiency compounds with scale. In smaller firms, the pain is sometimes masked by generalists absorbing the work into their broader remit.

This friction sits at the heart of payments strategy in 2025: the paradox of choice. The more ways you give a customer to pay or be paid, the more complexity you inherit. And the more complexity you inherit, the harder it becomes to deliver the qualities customers feel, like speed, transparency and reliability.

Increasingly, leaders are hunting for an operating model that can eliminate the “empty work” without sacrificing the choices that their customers demand. The benefit is not just cleaner dashboards. It is resilience against the future. New rails will emerge; regulators will change rules; M&A will add systems; sovereigns will mandate domestic schemes; and crypto will wax and wane. An orchestration-first model absorbs those shocks.

“Having a system that’s all in one place and can do all the modalities you need and connect with everything you need, that’s an ideal situation,” Kiewiet said.

Read also: Small Businesses Embrace Simplicity as Managing Cash Flow Becomes More Complex

How Fragmentation Happens and What to Do About It

Fragmentation is rarely the result of a single decision. It accumulates. Kiewiet pointed to three recurrent patterns. First, industry-mandated anchor systems, like the ERP in manufacturing, the patient management system in healthcare and the practice system in professional services, often define data models and workflows that payment layers must accommodate.

“You build in this automatic fragmentation except for the integrated source,” he said, because everything else lives adjacent to, rather than inside, the core system.

Second, mergers and acquisitions create “two different ways to do the same thing.” The acquired team is comfortable with its stack and loath to switch under operational pressure. Rationalizing contracts and adapting upstream integrations take time, and the near-term business case can be hard to prove.

“They need a reason to do that,” Kiewiet said, especially when switching means change management for embedded processes.

Third, there’s what Kiewiet called “staff familiarity.” People champion what they know.

“This is, ‘I’ve always used NetSuite, I’ve always used this accounting platform,’” he said. “Wherever they go, that’s what they promote. And so, any change to that is … met with resistance.”

Over time, those local optimizations create global inconsistency. Every team can reconcile its own provider; few can reconcile the enterprise. These forces are not going away. If anything, they intensify as firms expand geographies, add lines of business, and widen customer payment choices.

There is urgency to enacting effective orchestration, and customer expectations, not internal preferences, may set the tempo.

“The modern mind does not comprehend” waiting for money over weekends and holidays, Kiewiet said.

Businesses that cling to fragmented, human-orchestrated processes may spend more on maintenance, trigger more risk noise and fall behind on experience. Those that redesign for orchestration can turn the same complexity and the same optionality into an advantage.

See also: The Cash Flow Management Secret Weapon CFOs Didn’t Know They Had

The Case for Orchestration and Not Just Aggregation

If fragmentation is a structural consequence of optionality, what can replace it? Kiewiet advocated for an orchestration-first operating model. The goal is not a single vendor for everything, but rather a unified control plane for money movement, treasury and risk across whichever rails and banks an enterprise requires.

Such a model offers full visibility into the life cycle of money, or taking payments, making disbursements, managing accounts receivable and accounts payable, and monitoring cash at rest.

“There’s almost always a capital component,” Kiewiet said. “I have to have money to move money.”

Orchestration platforms that combine payments with embedded capital can smooth these peaks and valleys, allowing operations to “keep the trains running on time … [without] a call with your banker every time,” he said.

The journey starts with the customer, Kiewiet said. Map the next five years of expectations backward to today’s operating gaps. The goal is not to rip and replace but to sit above a firm’s banks, providers and rails with a single pane of glass through which any rail can be plugged in or swapped out.

Treasury and risk leaders, meanwhile, should anchor the business case in measurable outcomes, like reduced false positives and hold times, faster cycle time from authorization to availability, improved reserve transparency by rail and region, and lower effective cost of goods sold for money movement, inclusive of capital.

This approach also reframes what “payments strategy” means, he said. In fragmented environments, payment is often treated as a compliance and integration program, where success is measured by how little breaks. In an orchestrated environment, payments become an instrument for product velocity and working capital advantage.

“Do you want your money to move,” Kiewiet said, “or do you want your money to work?”

Sean Kiewiet is the chief strategy officer at Priority, which combines payables, merchant services, and banking and treasury solutions into one commerce engine, so finance leaders can accelerate cash flow and optimize working capital.