The Majority of Businesses Manage Payments Through Disconnected Systems, Corefy’s 2025 Study Finds

Why It Matters

Fragmented payment stacks increase operational risk and cost, hindering scalability as transaction volumes grow. Accelerating payment orchestration is therefore critical for competitive advantage and regulatory compliance.

Key Takeaways

• 58.5% use fragmented payment systems.
• Only 11.7% achieve advanced payment orchestration.
• Multi‑provider portfolios now cover 37.1% of firms.
• AI/ML automation adopted by 8.3% of respondents.
• Manual handling dropped to 1% of transactions.

Pulse Analysis

The persistence of fragmented payment architectures reflects a legacy of siloed fintech solutions that struggle to keep pace with today’s omnichannel commerce. Even as manual reconciliation dwindles, many enterprises still route transactions through disparate gateways, creating data silos and compliance blind spots. This fragmentation hampers real‑time reporting, inflates reconciliation costs, and exposes firms to fraud and settlement delays, especially as cross‑border volumes surge.

A growing proportion of businesses are assembling multi‑provider portfolios to mitigate single‑point failures and negotiate better rates. Corefy’s data shows that over a third now juggle five or more payment providers, turning routing logic, fallback mechanisms, and unified reporting into strategic imperatives. Payment orchestration platforms that centralise these connections can deliver dynamic routing, automatic failover, and consolidated analytics, turning complexity into a competitive lever. Companies that adopt such orchestration gain faster time‑to‑market for new payment methods and stronger leverage in provider negotiations.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are beginning to surface as differentiators in this space. Although only 8.3% of respondents report AI/ML‑driven automation, early adopters are using predictive models to flag fraudulent transactions, optimise routing based on cost and success rates, and streamline exception handling. As transaction volumes and regulatory scrutiny intensify, AI‑enhanced orchestration will likely shift from a niche capability to a baseline expectation, prompting firms to invest in scalable, intelligent payment infrastructures.