BridgerPay @ MPE 2022: The Demand for Payment Operations Platforms and Other Takeaways

This year MPE marks an incredible step forward for payment operations and payment orchestration platforms. Ran Cohen (CEO), Nir Bitton (VP Sales), and Ortal Haber (VP Strategic Partnerships & Revenue Growth) collected valuable information from merchants across numerous verticals and here are the key takeaways.

Payment Operations Platforms Are at the Top of Merchants’ Lists

We know that the automation of payment operations through a single platform is the future of digital payments. Merchants are putting years of resources and effort in trying to build in-house solutions, but they face many challenges that lead them to look for third-party solutions. This is where payment operation and payment orchestration platforms come into play.

The issues that merchants across all verticals are currently facing, and that payment orchestration is solving, are numerous and span from the necessity for omni-channel payments to the concern about conflict of interest created by the dependency on a single provider to manage payments.

The most important takeaway was that the need for a payment operations or payment orchestration platform stems from two needs that everyone is increasingly facing (both Enterprise and SME merchants): solving connection/integration issues and optimization of acceptance rates.

Solve Integration Issues

Merchants, independently of their size and industry, see that dev resources are getting more and more expensive, which makes payment integrations lengthy and put on them a hefty price tag. Payment operations platforms are needed to take the weight of integration off merchants by offering direct, codeless, and ready-made connections through a single API.

Optimize Acceptance Rates

Cross-border transactions have inevitably made it harder for merchants to improve their acceptance rates through legacy methods (Profitwell found that cross-border transactions are up to 250% more likely to be declined). Things like fraud-prevention tools help, but the real game-changer is a combination of leveraging multiple local payment providers and a real-time transaction retry system made possible by a payment orchestration layer.

Payment Orchestration: You Asked, We Answered

We were very happy to answer the many questions that merchants had about payment operations technology, and two struck us as the most common and worthy to be addressed in depth. We will soon write blog posts about them, but in the meantime here are some of the answers we shared about BridgerPay.

Are Payment Operations Platforms a Single Point of Failure?

In other words: what happens if BridgerPay goes down?

Unlike other payment systems that are still built on legacy technology and sitting on physical servers, BridgerPay is dynamic and built to be futureproof, with a series of fail-safes in place:

• We are based on big providers (like Google Cloud and Cloudflare) that are committed to our uptime
• We are replicated across multiple data centers and regions in the EU, and US regions are coming soon
• We monitor 24/7/365 for real-time issue identification and escalation

Unfortunately, there is a margin of risk. If a provider (of any service) guarantees you 100% up-time, you should check their status page (even huge providers like Stripe and PayPal have issues and failures every now and then). As part of our ongoing tasks, we review the application, infrastructure, and providers all the time, in order to get better solutions and technology to minimize the risk of downtime.

In a nutshell, many merchants we talked to at MPE are still relying on one or two payment providers connected directly to their websites. That is the true single point of failure, and a payment operations platform is the solution.

How Many Concurrent Transactions Can BridgerPay Process per Second Without Issues?

The answer is A LOT! Our latest stress test showed that 15k transactions can go through the BridgerPay system every second.

The most important fact is that as more merchants start adopting our technology and increasing the number of transactions they process, we will scale with them.

But the real question is: can BridgerPay handle sudden spikes or bursts in transactions? Yes, we can sustain planned and unplanned high-volume traffic events like Black Friday and great advertisement campaigns.

Autoscaling is part of our natural system design, we scale dynamically with merchants as they grow.

We stress-test the system periodically to adjust the autoscaling algorithm, constantly tuning our technology. Real-time monitoring allows us to understand the average load on the system in a way that it’s always in good health. We add computing power on an ongoing, monthly/daily basis.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we are also dependent on payment providers’ ability to handle the load, but if a provider is overloaded, we can retry the transactions and overcome single payment provider limitations.

The Bottom Line

Payment operations platforms are in increasingly high-demand across all verticals and requests are coming from merchants of all sizes. This is no surprise, as the payment ecosystem is flooded with an increasing number of solutions, each covering a piece of the puzzle, without a unifying platform that allows businesses to easily connect, manage, and optimize them.

A payment operations platform is not just a tool to improve merchants’ payment processing flows, it’s a revolutionary way to reach new markets, open new revenue streams, and gain a much-needed competitive advantage.

What matters most, and what we’ve taken home from MPE 2022 is that we have the technology to solve some of the biggest payment challenges, and merchants know that.