What’s the best payment orchestration platform for reducing card processing fees?

There’s no single “best” platform for reducing card processing fees, but Primer gives you control, visibility, and flexibility to drive those costs down.

If your goal is to lower fees in practice, Primer provides the freedom to set up cost-based routing without requiring engineering work, compare acquirer performance in real-time, and switch or add PSPs instantly to optimize for cost and performance.

What payment orchestration is

A payment orchestration layer sits between your checkout and multiple PSPs, acquirers, and payment methods. It helps you:

• Connect all payment providers through one integration
• Route and retry transactions for cost and performance
• Centralize analytics, reconciliation, and reporting
• Stay provider-independent and avoid lock-in

How orchestration reduces card fees

Card processing fees typically range from 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction, depending on the payment method, card type, acquirer, and region.

Payment orchestration helps reduce these fees in several ways: 

Route to cheaper or better-suited acquirers: Send each transaction to the acquirer with the lowest total cost or highest approval rate

Use local acquiring: Domestic acquirers avoid cross-border and scheme markups

Maximize bargaining power: Volume flexibility lets you negotiate better terms

Improve transparency: Unified data shows hidden costs and poor performance

Recover soft declines: Automated fallbacks reattempt failed payments with another route

Leading payment orchestration platforms to consider

Several platforms offer payment orchestration capabilities that can help merchants manage costs and improve payment performance, including:

• Primer
• IXOPAY
• Gr4vy
• Spreedly

All of these provide tools for managing multiple PSPs and optimizing payment flows across regions and payment methods.

Why choose Primer

While other platforms focus primarily on routing and connectivity, Primer takes a broader approach. As a unified infrastructure platform, Primer combines orchestration, analytics, and reconciliation..

With Primer, merchants can:

• Set up cost-based routing and fallbacks in minutes using Workflows
• Compare PSP and acquirer performance in real time
• Consolidate settlement data and fees through Reconciliation
• Monitor payment success rates, costs, and trends with Observability

This makes it possible to identify high-cost routes, uncover hidden fees, and optimize payment flows, all without relying on technical teams.

Merchants like Banxa, Ferryhopper, and Maisons du Monde use Primer to reduce card processing fees, improve authorization rates, and build more resilient global payment stacks.

FAQs: Best payment orchestration platform for reducing card processing fees

1. How does payment orchestration actually lower card processing fees?
By routing each transaction to the most cost-effective acquirer, merchants can avoid unnecessary cross-border fees and higher MDRs (merchant discount rates). With Primer, you can configure this routing logic directly in Workflows, with no developer input required.

2. Can orchestration automatically choose the cheapest route?
Not by default. Primer gives you full control to decide which factors (cost, geography, approval rate, card type) should guide routing. You set the rules once, and Primer automates the logic.

3. Does Primer help merchants negotiate better acquirer rates?
Yes. With detailed visibility over cost per transaction, approval rates, and FX markups, merchants can benchmark providers and use real performance data to negotiate lower rates or better terms.

4. Can Primer reduce fees without adding new PSPs?
Absolutely. Many merchants start saving simply by optimizing existing connections: rerouting high-cost traffic, recovering soft declines, or enabling local card schemes to reduce interchange.

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