RS2 White Paper Investigates New Wave of ‘Intelligent’ Global Payments—Is Your FI Prepared?
By W.B. King
Among takeaways from RS2 white paper, The Orchestration Imperative: Turning Payment Complexity into Strategic Advantage: The next phase of payments orchestration will be determined not by how many providers a business can connect to, but by how intelligently it can control and optimize what happens across those connections.
“Connecting to multiple payment providers is no longer the difficult part. The question is what you can do once those connections exist,” said Radi El Haj, Group CEO at RS2. The Frankfurt, Germany-based company bills itself as processing over 31 billion transactions annually with 99.99% platform uptime, while also enabling banks, financial institutions, and payments companies to simplify complexity, scale internationally, and operate with full control across the payments value chain.
“While payments have become frictionless for consumers, they have grown exponentially more complex for the organizations responsible for delivering them across multiple providers, markets, payment methods, and regulatory environments. A single checkout may involve cards, wallets, account-to-account (A2A) transfers, alternative payment methods (APMs), fraud tools, token services, gateways, acquirers and multiple regulatory requirements,” the white paper stated, adding that the global payments industry supports 3.6 trillion transactions and approximately $2 quadrillion in value flows, generating $2.5 trillion in revenue. “Beneath a simple ‘Pay now’ button sits an increasingly fragmented network of commercial and technical relationships.”
Strategic Capability
Published in September 2026, the white paper further contends that businesses risk mistaking payment connectivity and basic failover rates for genuine payments orchestration. As a result, significant improvements in transaction performance, resilience and control are being unrealized.
“The distinction is increasingly important as businesses operate across a growing combination of payment methods, gateways, acquirers, fraud services, token providers and regulatory environments,” RS2 noted. “While 89% of organizations surveyed had implemented payment failover or redundancy, only 41% had automated dynamic routing and just 22% continuously updated their routing logic. Only 7% had full control over payment tokens, while 3% said adding a new payment rail was very easy.”
Additionally, 55% of those polled continued to make routing decisions manually and 68% relied on manual intervention to switch providers during outages. As a result, El Haj posited the following questions: “Can every transaction be routed according to performance, cost and risk? Can you automatically move traffic when a provider fails? Can you introduce a new payment method or acquirer without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure? And, crucially, can you make those decisions using real-time intelligence rather than manual intervention?”
His answer, in part: “That is where orchestration moves from being an integration exercise to becoming a strategic capability.” The potential impact is also significant, he added.
“Among companies in the research possessing five key orchestration capabilities, 78% reported transaction-completion improvements of at least 2%, compared with only 10% of organizations possessing three or four,” he continued. “For businesses processing payments at scale, even relatively small improvements in completion rates can translate into meaningful additional revenue while reducing the operational cost and risk associated with managing increasingly complex payment environments.”
Optimize and Adapt
To address the noted gap in services, RS2 identified five capabilities that distinguish mature payment orchestration: connect, control, optimize, protect and adapt. “These allow organizations to connect multiple providers through a consistent integration layer; apply business and commercial rules centrally; dynamically route and retry transactions; coordinate fraud and authentication controls; and introduce new providers, markets and payment rails without repeatedly rebuilding core payment infrastructure.”
Banks can introduce new payment capabilities progressively alongside legacy infrastructure, while acquirers can strengthen resilience and performance visibility and maintain a more strategic role in the merchant relationship as larger merchants increasingly adopt multi-acquirer models, El Haj explained.
“Payments are becoming more complex underneath precisely as consumers expect them to become simpler. The organizations that succeed will not necessarily be those with the most connections,” he noted. “They will be those capable of making the entire payment ecosystem behave as one intelligent environment — continuously selecting the best route, responding to disruption and adapting as markets, costs and customer behavior change.”
