How to scale your payment stack: Optimizing global payments
Industry
9 Dec 2025
10 min
Andrii Kononenko
Head of Merchant Operations, Solidgate
Faster integrations, streamlined routing, and scalable infrastructure – this guide explains how to scale your payment stack, and how Solidgate can help.
Most online businesses start with one payment provider. It covers all their core needs, and limitations are minimal and insignificant for their bottom line.
But at some point, transaction volumes begin to grow, business models and offerings expand, and scaling into new markets becomes a priority.
That’s when the limitations start showing up as high processing costs, lower payment acceptance, and a lack of local payment methods. Payments become a cost center that stalls growth and requires optimization on all fronts.
This guide explains what a payment stack consists of, how it affects business growth and bottom line, and how to assemble a stack that scales with your needs.
What is a payment stack?
A payment stack includes the combination of all the tools, systems, and services that work together to enable, process, and manage payments for a business.
It’s essentially the infrastructure that allows you to accept payments from customers, securely handle those transactions, and manage everything related to the payment lifecycle, from the moment a customer makes a purchase to when the funds are deposited into your account.
As an online business, your payment stack enables customers to pay you in their preferred ways while ensuring transactions are processed efficiently, securely, and in compliance with local regulations.
Depending on your growth stage, you might have a single provider like Stripe or Adyen that covers most of your payment needs, or multiple integrations that complement each other.
As you scale and your needs grow, your payments infrastructure normally expands to meet them.
What are the key components of a payment stack?
Every business will have a payment stack that reflects its specific needs, goals, and operational setup. While some businesses may rely on a simple, single-provider solution, others require a more complex, multi-provider stack with tailored components to suit their specific requirements.
A comprehensive payment stack comprises several crucial components that play vital roles in the payment process. Let’s break down these core elements and explain how they work together to create a smooth payment experience:
- Payment gateway: It's the first step in the payment process; its key function is to securely authorize and transmit payment information. A good payment gateway ensures smooth, fast transactions and maintains security standards to build customer trust.
- Payment processor: Verifies funds and transfers the payment. A reliable ensures quick approvals and seamless fund transfers, essential for reducing failed transactions.
- Merchant account: A bank account specifically used to hold funds from card transactions before they’re deposited into your business's main account. Without a merchant account, accepting card payments is impossible.
- Payment service provider (PSP): A is an all-in-one solution for accepting multiple payment methods, including card payments, bank transfers, and (APMs) such as Apple Pay or PayPal. PSPs also often provide fraud protection and compliance support to simplify payment processing.
- Risk and compliance solutions: Help you manage payment risks and ensure that your business complies with relevant regulations. These solutions include tools for fraud detection, (AML), and compliance.
- Acquiring bank: The acts as the liaison between your business and the broader financial system, ensuring payments are properly processed and settled. It’s responsible for depositing funds into your merchant account after a transaction is authorized.
- Fraud management systems: Systems that track patterns and detect anomalies, helping block suspicious activity before it impacts your business.
- Checkout interface: The checkout interface is where your customers enter their payment details. It’s critical that this experience is user-friendly, secure, and supports multiple payment methods that your customers prefer.
- Billing and invoicing software: Helps you manage transaction records, generate invoices, and track payments. For subscription-based businesses, it can also handle and automated renewals.
- Reconciliation and reporting tools: These tools help match payment transactions to bank statements, track fees, and generate financial reports, ensuring your books are always in order. They give you full visibility into your payment flows, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that your financial reports are accurate.
The key here is how these components come together to provide a seamless experience for both your business and your customers.
Single-provider setup vs. payment stack: What is the difference?
The progression from a single-provider setup to a more complex payment infrastructure usually starts with growing your payment stack.
Scaling your payment operations means expanding to a more complex payment infrastructure – a comprehensive payment stack – that helps you optimize for payment performance, cost-efficiency, and global expansion.
Here’s how the two compare:
Besides breaking free of provider lock-in, this progression gives you a competitive advantage. It helps you optimize for payment performance, achieve higher , minimize payment costs, and expand into new regions with local payment methods and acquirers.
A comprehensive payment stack also improves operational efficiency by providing better data analysis and streamlined processes, while enabling smooth transactions that enhance customer satisfaction and reduce friction.
The challenges of building a fragmented payment stack
As your business grows, relying on a single provider or multiple fragmented systems can create major hurdles: managing multiple integrations, higher processing costs, lower approval rates for online payments, and a lack of local payment options.
Increasing transaction volume further complicates your payment stack, making it harder to maintain efficiency and accuracy. Your payment system becomes a bottleneck, and what was once a minor issue now feels like a major roadblock to scaling.
Managing multiple development projects
Integrating multiple payment providers and methods is a resource-intensive task. Each new provider means another set of APIs, documentation, and maintenance requirements.
As you scale, you’re burdened with multiple integration projects, each of which pulls resources away from your core product. It’s a constant cycle – new integrations here, maintenance there – without a clear end in sight.
Payment data becomes fragmented
With multiple providers, payment data quickly becomes fragmented. Each provider has its own reporting format, settlement schedule, and fee structure, making it difficult to reconcile payments across systems. Your finance team spends hours, if not days, manually matching records, tracking payments, and verifying transactions.
Without a centralized system, your business can’t access comprehensive data across all systems. This forces payment managers to work with data in silos, preventing them from optimizing payment flows or building a unified payment strategy.
Solidgate's unified approach to a payment stack
Scaling your payment stack doesn’t have to be complex. With Solidgate, you can move beyond fragmented, piecemeal payment integrations to a unified infrastructure that simplifies every aspect of your payment operations under one roof.
Instead of managing separate payment providers, methods, and integrations, Solidgate enables you to scale and expand globally with minimal effort on the payment acceptance side.
Our end-to-end payment infrastructure helps online businesses enter new markets across Europe, the U.S., Latin America, Asia, and more. We help you optimize payment performance, minimize fraud, reduce operational load, and ensure compliance – all through a single integrated solution.
Businesses that have scaled globally with Solidgate have seen up to a 20% reduction in time-to-market when expanding into new regions, enabling faster growth without the usual headaches.
Here’s why businesses with global ambitions work with Solidgate.
Simplify payment integrations and expand globally
As businesses grow, they often start with one payment provider but soon face the challenge of scaling and expanding to new regions.
Solidgate offers plug-and-play capabilities that connect your existing payment providers, commerce platforms, CRMs, and internal systems seamlessly. No more time-consuming integrations or managing disparate contracts.
Our allows businesses to add new payment methods, geographies, and PSPs in just a few clicks, enabling rapid scaling without the overhead of manual integrations or additional legal contracts. This level of integration makes expanding into new markets both fast and cost-efficient.
Our clients have seen up to a 15% increase in transaction success rates across regions, thanks to automatic failover and multi-PSP support.
Adapt your checkout for global markets
When expanding globally, offering a localized checkout experience is key to conversions. Solidgate’s customizable checkout pages automatically adapt to local languages, currencies, and payment preferences, ensuring customers have a smooth, tailored experience.
Whether you add Apple Pay and , PayPal, or local payment methods like PIX/ or BLIK, Solidgate ensures you’re offering the right options for your customers, improving conversion rates and the user experience.
Reduce risk and ensure payment continuity
As your business scales, the risk of payment downtime or transaction failures increases. Relying on a single provider exposes you to disruptions that can affect your revenue.
Solidgate mitigates these risks with a multi-PSP architecture that enables automatic failover to backup payment providers. This ensures that transactions continue smoothly, even if one provider experiences issues, reducing payment disruptions and maximizing transaction success rates.
In addition, Solidgate offers real-time monitoring and prevention alerts to manage risk proactively. Our cascades/fallbacks ensure that failed transactions are automatically retried or rerouted, minimizing lost revenue.
Optimize for efficient payment processing and performance
With Solidgate, payment performance optimization becomes simple. Our technology allows you to set up custom rules to route transactions to the best-acquiring provider based on real-time conditions, reducing costs and increasing authorization rates.
Least-cost routing ensures you’re always choosing the most cost-effective processor, whether you’re processing payments in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, or Asia. Solidgate’s platform helps you navigate the complexities of regional payment preferences and currency exchange rates seamlessly.
Manage subscriptions and customer retention
For subscription-based businesses, reducing churn and managing recurring payments are crucial. Solidgate’s subscription management tools allow you to customize billing cycles, create flexible pricing plans, and automate renewals.
Our automatically retry at optimal times, improving payment success rates and user lifetime value (LTV).
Solidgate’s dunning campaigns help you recover payments when customers’ cards fail, further improving retention without manual intervention. Our subscription tools also let you offer dynamic discounts and instant upsells, maximizing revenue per user.
In total, Solidgate’s smart retry system has helped businesses improve payment recovery by 15%, while increasing LTV by 7% through dynamic upselling and automated dunning campaigns.
Protect from fraud and chargebacks
The more transactions you process, the higher the risk of fraud and chargebacks. Solidgate’s advanced fraud prevention tools detect suspicious activity before it impacts your business.
It operates in real time to identify and prevent fraudulent activity, so you can deliver secure, compliant payment stack operations
Solidgate’s automated and systems simplify the dispute resolution process. By leveraging transaction data, we automate responses, improve chargeback win rates, and reduce administrative work.
Our clients have reported a 20% reduction in chargeback costs and a 15% reduction in fraud thanks to real-time monitoring and automated chargeback management.
Centralize payment reporting and analytics
As your stack grows, managing payment data becomes a full-time job. We centralize all your payment data into real-time analytics dashboards, giving you a clear view of key metrics such as revenue, conversion rates, chargeback statistics, and customer behavior.
This unified helps you make informed decisions, optimize payment flows, and monitor performance effectively.
Solidgate also provides full visibility into your payment reconciliation process, ensuring that transactions are properly accounted for and that you have accurate, actionable data. Our merchants using unified reporting have reduced manual reconciliation time by up to 20% and gained better insights into their payment performance.
Why partner with Solidgate?
Unlike fragmented multi-provider setups, Solidgate offers an end-to-end payment solution that centralizes payment operations, reduces risk, and increases efficiency. We simplify your payment stack, whether you’re expanding globally or optimizing your current system.
By providing tools for , fraud prevention, chargeback management, global tax compliance, and subscription management, Solidgate enables your business to scale seamlessly, optimize performance, and improve conversion rates while remaining compliant with local regulations.
So, does it scale?
Your payment stack is a core business asset that drives growth, improves customer retention, and ensures global scalability. As your ambitions expand, your infrastructure must evolve to support it.
Evaluate your current payment setup. Are you facing challenges like fragmented data, payment declines, or difficulty expanding globally? If so, it’s time to consider a unified payment solution like Solidgate to streamline operations, optimize performance, reduce fraud, and help you scale with ease.
to discuss how Solidgate can help you optimize your payment stack and ensure your payment infrastructure is ready for the next phase of growth.
