Zubin Vandrevala from Gr4vy joined PAYMENTS FM to talk about payment orchestration, routing, provider control, and how merchants should think before adding more complexity.
State of Payments survey
We are launching the State of Payments survey. It takes about four minutes to complete, and anonymous responses are welcome. We will publish the results at the end of the year.
Why this matters
Orchestration gives merchants more control, but control only helps when the team knows what it wants to improve.
A second provider can improve resilience. It can also add reporting work, routing rules, reconciliation gaps, and more vendor management.
The business case should be clear before the stack grows. Are you trying to improve approvals, reduce cost, support new markets, add payment methods, or reduce provider risk?
What to watch
Measure orchestration through business outcomes, not vendor count.
Approval rate by route
Cost by provider
Failover performance
Market coverage
Payment method coverage
Reporting consistency
Reconciliation quality
Routing rule complexity
What it means for your team
Orchestration works best when product, engineering, finance, risk, and operations share the same goal.
Product needs better checkout outcomes. Engineering needs routing that can be maintained. Finance needs trusted reporting. Risk needs enough data for reviews. Operations needs clear incident handling when a provider has an issue.
What to do next
Start with the problem, then choose the setup.
Define why orchestration is needed
Pick the first success metric
Test failover before launch
Keep routing rules simple
Align reporting with finance
Review reconciliation early
Document who owns changes
Questions to ask internally
What problem should orchestration solve?
Which provider routes perform best by market?
How do we know failover worked?
Can finance trust the reporting?
Who owns routing rules after launch?
Does the added complexity pay for itself?
Guest perspective
Orchestration is useful when it solves a clear business problem.
Routing needs measurement across approval rate, cost, reliability, and operations.
More providers can help, but they also create more rules and more reporting work.
Merchants should keep the setup simple enough for the team to operate.
Listen or watch
Resources
Related episodes
Open Banking and Pay by Bank with Anubhav Pradhan, ShiftMate
Payments Data for Business Success with Albert Drouart, Pagos
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