Alexandre’s answer – shaped by a career that started at Amadeus (the origin of orchestration, as he puts it), moved through the consumer side and five years leading go-to-market at Klarna, and now sits at the VP of Western Europe role at Solidgate – came back to a theme he returned to throughout the conversation: control.
In this interview, he unpacks a shift he’s seeing across his merchant conversations: orchestration is evolving from a redundancy play into a commercial strategy that involves not just payment engineers, but CFOs and operations leads.
Merchants spend big on acquisition, then leave payments on autopilot
A pattern Alexandre sees across businesses processing $20M+ annually: the top of the funnel is a science, but the payment layer is running on autopilot.
Depending on the business line you’re operating in, you spend so much money to get to the customer – on positioning, marketing, consumer acquisition. You focus so much there that everything happening at the payment layer is kind of left at the status quo.
That status quo usually means a single PSP (payment service provider) chosen a couple of years ago, when the company was smaller and simpler. The problem is that “working” and “performing” are two different things.
When you have an acceptance rate of 80%, that’s not fine. You can actually start digging into it and working on things to improve it.
Alexandre puts the inflection point at around $20M in total payment volume (TPV). Below that, payment inefficiencies are easy to ignore. Above it, every percentage point of authorization starts showing up on the balance sheet. An 80% acceptance rate means one in five paying customers didn’t complete their purchase – after the business already paid to bring them to the checkout.
That’s the moment when payments stop being a back-office function and become a revenue conversation.
The real risk of a single PSP isn’t downtime – it’s loss of control
The original pitch for orchestration was simple: what happens if your PSP goes down? You need a backup. That argument still holds, but Alexandre says it misses the bigger point.
We don’t rely on a single bank for our own lives. So in payments it’s exactly the same – why do we have a single player having control of everything that is so core to your business, which is receiving the money for your products or your services?
When one provider controls routing, token management, data, and commercial terms, the merchant has no ability to benchmark performance, negotiate from strength, or adapt to changing conditions. The PSP decides which acquirer handles each transaction. The PSP decides the retry logic. And because the data sits in their dashboard, there’s no independent view of what’s working and what’s not.
Alexandre’s framing is practical. Every merchant is different – different goals, different architecture, different resources. Some need a single gateway connected to multiple acquirers. Others need a full orchestration layer. At Solidgate, the team works as consultant partners with each merchant to figure out the right setup.
Sometimes the goal is margin, sometimes the goal is performance – and we need to adapt to that.
In practice, those conversations at Solidgate tend to cluster around three areas: conversion, costs, and risk. But the common thread is control. The merchant should be the one deciding what happens with their transactions – not the gateway or the acquirer.
Where the numbers get hard to ignore
Smart routing and cascading are the capabilities Alexandre comes back to throughout the conversation – and the data points he shares are specific.
On routing, he pushes back on the basic version most people picture: splitting volume 80/20 between two acquirers. Real smart routing goes deeper.
You can get really into the details – location of the consumer, type of card, bank, and so many other things we can do on a metadata perspective. Some merchants actually send us the segmentation on the API message for us to be able to route that way.
He shares a straightforward example. JP Morgan is the largest card issuer in the US. When the issuing bank and the acquiring bank are the same institution, approval rates tend to be higher and interchange tends to be lower.
Routing US-issued JP Morgan cards to JP Morgan acquiring is a no-brainer rule. At Solidgate, the team doesn’t just suggest the merchant should try it; we go directly to the acquirer, open the merchant accounts (MIDs), and start testing in staging.
That’s possible, Alexandre explains, because Solidgate maintains PayFac relationships with tier-one acquirers. The company can act on routing insights, not just surface them.
On cascading, the numbers are striking.
Recovery rates are around 8% through cascading. And 90% of merchants out there are not using cascading nowadays.
Even for merchants with strong acceptance rates above 90%, adding a cascade still recovers 2–3% of volume.
3% at the scale of a multi-million dollar business – that’s a lot of money.
The play varies by merchant. Some come in with great pricing from a local acquirer, but acceptance rates are around 70%. Alexandre’s approach: keep the local acquirer in the first position to respect the commercial relationship, then cascade failures to a tier-one provider. This closes the gap fast.
When you bring up acceptance rate deltas between tier-one acquirers in the same market, the numbers also tell a story: up to 5 percentage points of difference. Not between a good acquirer and a bad one, but between two strong providers processing the same merchant’s traffic.
Those numbers are what pull CFOs and operations leads into a conversation that used to live entirely within the payments team.
The orchestration question PSPs are still working through
Justin puts the question directly: Do PSPs have a problem with orchestration platforms? Alexandre is candid.
I don’t think they will admit it, but they have [a problem with it]. Because it’s nonsense when you get to a certain level of volume to be putting all your money in a single provider.
But he’s quick to acknowledge a positive shift: many PSPs now position themselves as doing orchestration. That’s good for the market – it educates merchants on what’s possible and raises the bar for everyone involved. The structural question is about scope, not quality.
A PSP can do some routing, some connectivity on alternative payment methods (APMs). But the real orchestrator needs to sit a level behind – that’s where you actually find the real gains.
The distinction matters. When a PSP adds routing capabilities, it’s routing between its own connections. A standalone orchestration layer sits above the full stack and can create competition between multiple providers – giving merchants independent visibility into who’s performing where.
That’s a different proposition, and it complements what PSPs do rather than replacing it.
I think what we can do better is actually to work better together – to make sure that things are easy for the merchants but also for our partners and the ecosystem.
In practice, the strongest setups Alexandre sees are ones where PSPs and orchestration layers work together. The PSP brings acquiring strength, local market expertise, and processing reliability. The orchestration layer brings provider-agnostic routing, cascading across acquirers, and a single view of performance data. The merchant gets the best of both.
There is space for everyone who is good at what they do. Whoever is good in this industry will always have merchants and always have more volume.
The Shelf of Shame: Merchant onboarding in 2026
Every Payments Shed episode ends with the Shelf of Shame – one thing the guest would banish from the industry. Alexandre’s pick: Know Your Customer (KYC) processes and merchant onboarding.
We have so many cool companies offering really smooth KYC tools, and sometimes you see stuff like sending an ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) to a specific branch to sign some papers. That’s what gets me crazy.
Digital-first identity verification exists. The tools are there. And yet parts of the ecosystem still operate like it’s 2005. That friction slows down everything a modern payments strategy depends on – market expansion, acquirer diversification, and the ability to act on performance data while it’s still relevant.
It’s a fitting note to end on, because it captures the broader theme of the conversation: the payments industry has the technology to work better. The question is whether the ecosystem will adapt fast enough to match the merchants who are already thinking this way.
