Watch the full MPE 2025 keynote session by Ugur Cinar to learn more about how modularity is shaping the future of payments.
Prefer to read? Here's a summary of the key takeaways:
Managing payments is rocket science. This might sound like an exaggeration, but as Ugur put it during his keynote at MPE 2025, the payments landscape has become as complex and mission-critical as aerospace engineering. In an industry where precision, flexibility, and scalability are paramount, modularity is emerging as the only viable approach for enterprises looking to ensure their payment system stays flexible as they grow.
Payments have evolved, but complexity remains
The evolution of online payments has been defined by a growing need for flexibility and control. Initially, online payments were simple, focused solely on processing transactions. Merchants relied on a single provider with little room for customization. As e-commerce expanded, providers began bundling additional services like fraud detection and reconciliation, improving overall functionality.
However, enterprises operating in multiple markets soon faced a challenge: a single provider could not meet all their needs. Merchants started integrating multiple payment providers to optimize costs, authorization rates, and coverage. While this unlocked new opportunities, it also introduced complexity, fragmented data, operational inefficiencies, and an increased burden on internal teams.
Today, we are in the era of modularity. Enterprises are shifting toward a best-in-class payment stack, selecting the best providers and solutions for specific use cases while ensuring seamless integration. This approach grants full control over the payment experience, optimizing success rates, reducing costs, and improving operational efficiency.
Traditional vs. modular payment setups
To understand why modularity is a necessity, let’s compare traditional and modular payment architectures:
This transformation is not just about adding more payment options, it’s about designing a system that allows businesses to respond quickly and strategically to changing demands.
The three pillars of the future of payments
According to Ugur, the future of payments will be shaped by three key principles: modularity, flexibility, and being agnostic.
1. Modularity: building blocks for payment innovation
Modularity means breaking down complex systems into smaller, interchangeable components. In payments, this includes services like orchestration, tokenization, FX management, and analytics, all of which can be integrated independently based on business needs.
Yet, modularity is not just about adding more options, it’s about enabling merchants to tailor their own payment stack. Payments are not one-size-fits-all. Even within the same industry, two enterprises may have vastly different payment needs. The ability to customize and fine-tune each component is what sets modern payment infrastructures apart.
2. Flexibility: adapting to business needs, not the other way around
Historically, enterprises have had to adapt their business models to the limitations of payment providers. Today, the expectation has reversed, payment solutions should adapt to merchants, not the other way around.
For example, merchants expanding into new markets often encounter providers with limited feature support. Instead of restructuring business logic, enterprises can leverage dynamic workflows to maintain seamless payment acceptance across different regions. This ensures a consistent customer experience while optimizing for local conditions.
3. Agnostic approach: the foundation of true merchant control
Being agnostic in payments means two things:
- Technology-agnostic: The ability to integrate with any provider or technology without being locked into a single ecosystem. This goes hand in hand with delivering high-quality integrations, ensuring they’re reliably maintained, and continuously evolving to match each provider’s latest innovations.
- Provider-agnostic: A commitment to neutrality, ensuring that the payment platform does not financially benefit from specific partnerships or providers and merchants can choose what fits best to their interests.
Many orchestration platforms claim to be agnostic, yet their business models often rely on revenue shares, kickbacks from PSPs, or are even owned by them. True agnostic approach means putting merchant interests first, enabling businesses to select providers purely based on performance, cost, and suitability.
Building a modular payment stack: powered by tech and partnerships
Even with modularity, enterprises don’t want to manage dozens of providers on their own. The best modular setups leverage strong partnerships, ensuring smooth integrations, compliance alignment, and proactive support.
- Beyond a vendor relationship: Merchants should work closely with payment providers, not just for transaction processing but for strategic collaboration, helping to fine-tune their payment experience over time.
- Compliance and regulatory support: Keeping up with compliance standards, scheme updates, and local regulations is a major burden. Strong payment partners should proactively advise on regulatory changes.
- Reducing complexity while retaining control: The ideal modular setup balances internal control over payments with external expertise that removes unnecessary operational burden.
Real-world examples of modularity in payments driving success
- Processor independence with tokenization: Vinted achieved full processor independence through a PSP-agnostic token vault, allowing seamless provider switching while maintaining business continuity. Read the full case study.
- Dynamic payment routing for global markets: inDrive optimized its payment authorization rates by leveraging Payrails’ dynamic routing capabilities, achieving an 11% increase in card approval rates and a 70% reduction in time-to-market. See how inDrive did it.
- Automated 3DS decisioning: Merchants processing in emerging markets face varying 3DS adoption levels. By implementing risk-based 3DS triggers, enterprises can adapt authentication requirements based on real-time risk scores, minimizing friction while maintaining security.
- Chargeback prevention workflows: When disputes arise, proactive refund strategies can prevent chargebacks before they escalate. Merchants can trigger refunds based on issuer notifications and automate customer outreach to recover relationships while reducing costs and potential fines from card schemes and acquirers.
- Payout flexibility and reconciliation: Some use-cases require batch payouts, while others need API-based disbursements. Enterprises can build workflows that bridge these gaps, ensuring smooth fund distribution that can scale as business grows.
Built to scale: why modularity matters more than ever
To conclude, modularity is no longer a nice-to-have, it is a necessity. As payments become more complex, enterprises that embrace modular infrastructure and strategically combine it with their own capabilities will gain a competitive advantage in efficiency, scalability, and adaptability.
The payments industry is moving beyond simple transaction processing. The real question is: how do you bring different components together to solve business challenges? The answer lies in a modular, flexible, and agnostic approach—giving enterprises the tools to scale faster, operate more efficiently, and maintain full control over their payment setup.
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