Amid the rapid transformation of the payments industry, merchants have leveraged multiple acquirers to navigate new payment types, regulations, and consumer expectations.
For example, operating across regions like the European Union often requires merchants to work with multiple acquirers to navigate the unique regulatory, payment, and consumer nuances of all 27 countries. Increasingly, however, multi-acquiring is no longer just a European necessity. Many U.S.-based companies have embraced this model to support transactions across e-commerce, in-store, and mobile apps. Tier 1 US merchants are doing business across Europe, with many doing business worldwide, running into the same requirements as their EU based counterparts.
Against this backdrop, ACI Worldwide conducted a study of more than 100 Tier 1 merchants with over $500 million in annual revenue. Roughly half of these merchants primarily operate in North America, with the remainder based in Europe.
In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Dan Coates, Product Management Director at ACI Worldwide, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discussed the study’s most compelling findings—highlighting the tangible impact on merchant performance and the growing role of payments orchestration as a core operational capability to reduce complexity and unify analytics for more informed decision making.
Acquiring By Default
The single-acquirer model is quickly becoming a relic of the past. Today, nearly 97% of enterprise merchants operate with multiple acquirers.
However, this shift is often driven by necessity, rather than intentional strategy.
“While I think there’s a desire to have a single acquirer, in many cases they end up that way by default,” Coates said. “In North America, there’s also a view that by using multiple providers—not necessarily card acquirers—that they are multi-acquirer as well. They’ve got a different private-label credit card provider, a different gift card provider, they’re leveraging a gift card mall and all those things. I think those are the fundamentals contributing to that 97% number.”
Merchants are responding to consumer expectations for higher authorization rates, broader payment method support, and uninterrupted transactions.
Still, the upside is hard to ignore. ACI found that four in 10 respondents experienced an average acceptance rate lift of approximately 1%, while nearly two-thirds reported cost reductions of at least 2%. At enterprise scale, even modest percentage gains can translate into significant revenue and margin improvements.
These bottom-line benefits help explain why the remaining minority of single-acquirer merchants is shrinking—and why multi-acquiring, supported by orchestration, is fast becoming the standard rather than the exception.
“It’s been an interesting evolution to watch as enterprise merchants expand their acquiring relationships past a single acquirer,” Apgar said. “That was always the standard—to have one simple, straightforward acquiring relationship. But I think merchants have grown in ways that a single-acquirer could no longer support. Everybody’s got their own product road map, and by necessity it forced a lot of enterprise merchants to seek alternative relationships to fill gaps in their payment stack.”
The Relevance of the Results
Merchants are increasingly diversifying their payment strategies, often driven by the desire to support local or alternative payment methods. This includes dominant domestic real-time payment systems like UPI in India or Pix in Brazil. Adding another acquirer can also be necessary for tapping into widely adopted digital wallets like Venmo or PayPal, giving merchants access to a broader customer base.
“We need to look at these results because it may reveal something about how you’re using multi-acquiring that may not align, or maybe a different view in the world as to how others are using multi-acquiring,” Coates said. “We have to look at this from the bottom line: How do I increase revenue? How do I reduce costs? How do I defend myself against chargebacks?”
Multi-acquiring strategies give merchants a real-time lens on the payments landscape. By comparing acquirers and pivoting between them, businesses can secure the most competitive rates.
“Merchants, especially at the enterprise level, famously want to compare notes and understand who’s doing it better than they are, who’s doing it less expensively than they are, and who’s getting more results out of a certain process,” Apgar said. “But market rate is dependent on the application and the use case.”
“Merchants love to say, ‘How come he’s paying less than I am?’” he said. “But the reality is the use case is never identical, there’s always extenuating factors about the application and the requirements that drive costs.”
Shaping the Acquiring Strategies
Several factors shape a merchant’s acquiring strategy. For example, businesses with both brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce platforms often navigate different rate structures across channels. The merchant’s industry also matters: grocers and department stores usually benefit from lower rates, while high-risk sectors—like gaming—face higher costs.
The proliferation of payment types is further redefining strategy. According to ACI, merchants prioritized which payments methods they most want their acquirers to support, with digital wallets topping the list.
“When you look at a wallet, it’s a container for other payment types, typically cards,” Coates said. “Wallets help things because they maintain and manage those cards. You can’t put an expired card into a wallet. If the card expires while it’s in the wallet, the wallet’s going to yell at you and say, ‘Hey, your card expired, you can’t use this anymore.’”
“If the card gets lost or stolen, all of a sudden we’re getting responses from the wallet that there is an issue with the card,” he said. “Card approvals were great; mobile wallet approvals are even better.”
Following closely were account-to-account banking transfers, buy now, pay later services, and even cryptocurrency. Other emerging needs include Click to Pay from providers like Visa and Mastercard, alongside greater support for local payment rails.
With this rapidly evolving mix of payment types and consumer preferences, merchant payments are more complex than ever.
“Merchants got into multi-acquiring because of channel expansion and country expansion, and a lot of them lost visibility across channels with different tokenization schemes, different fraud schemes, and different settlement schemes,” Apgar said. “Orchestration is a way to pull out those standard elements across the acquiring landscape and bring that continuity back to the enterprise.”
Defining the Orchestration
Payments orchestration has evolved beyond simple gateways that connect merchants to multiple providers. Modern orchestration platforms now integrate 3-D Secure authentication, risk management, point-to-point encryption for in-store transactions, and tokenization—addressing the full spectrum of payment complexity.
For merchants, managing these services themselves is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, inefficiencies, and lost revenue. A true payments orchestration platform takes on this burden, providing a single, centralized hub where every transaction is visible and manageable in real time.
“You make one single call; it’s doing an orchestrated list or pipeline of tasks,” Coates said. “I am going to check the risk on that consumer, I am going to execute a 3-D Secure risk check if the score comes back and do that step-up authentication. Then, I’m going to go ahead and do the authorization and then do a post-authorization risk check.”
“Before I return a response to the merchant, I am also going to tokenize that card number such that they do not have PCI data and they can also reference that number in the future,” he said. “That is what I define as orchestration.”
These platforms unify what was once a highly fragmented operation, offering merchants a single view of all their payment activity, regardless of the number of acquirers involved. Smart retry, for example, allows a payment initially declined by a global acquirer to be automatically rerouted through a local one. While the local acquirer may charge slightly more, the approach prevents lost sales and reduces cart abandonment—a tradeoff that is often highly profitable.
Similarly, least-cost routing optimizes every transaction based on factors like channel, transaction type, and issuing country. This ensures that payments are processed through the acquirer offering the least-expensive and best approval rate.
“That’s where we’re seeing a lot of growth in AI in this whole scheme because you’re talking about maximizing approval rates and using higher cost networks only when necessary,” Apgar said. “Before, there was always a lot of rules-based structure around how to operate in an orchestrated environment. If you get this kind of a card, send it over here. If it fails at point A, send it to point B.”
“Now AI is making that more dynamic. Rather than following a structured rule set, the orchestration platform can make these decisions on the fly and the rules adapt to the environment as the issuers change, as the external environment changes and affects the merchant,” he said.
Keeping Top of Mind
The technology behind payments orchestration is sophisticated, yet the goal is simple: increase approval rates, reduce chargebacks, and lower overall payment costs—all while freeing merchants from operational complexity.
As the payments landscape continues to undergo transformative changes, orchestration platforms will remain critical for merchants looking to maximize revenue and stay competitive. Three key trends are set to make this technology even more essential in 2026.
“Number one, payment methods and payment channels will continue to increase and proliferate,” Coates said. “It’s more complex, there’s more channels, there’s more payment types, and payment methods that are out there. That makes payments orchestration all the more important as we go forward. Number two is AI. It’s been a big topic and we’ll be implementing methods to use and leverage AI to address those challenges.”
“Number three is agentic commerce, which has become a strong topic—and will continue to be—because it is at the crossroads of all those things,” he said. “When we think about multi-acquirer and multiple payment methods—we’re leveraging AI and we’re leveraging crypto potentially along with those things—it’s bringing that all together in one single place. It’s an exciting time to be in payments.”
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