Payment Orchestration Overview

PayPal's Payment Orchestration is a layer that lets merchants connect to multiple PSPs or acquirers and value-added services through a single integration, so they can route and manage transactions without building and maintaining many direct connections. It improves authorization performance, adds redundancy, supports geographical expansion, and simplifies ecosystem management.

Merchants can use their existing Braintree integration to enable orchestration with no changes to their client-side tokenization or SDK code, while gaining the ability to reach markets and card networks and build relationships.

Payment orchestration provides the following benefits:

• Scale globally without re-integrating. Merchants can activate additional PSPs and local acquiring in high-growth regions using their existing Braintree SDK or GraphQL integration — no new client-side code and no new checkout flow.
• Improve authorization rates with local acquiring. Cross-border traffic declines more often due to issuer risk rules and currency friction. Routing through local acquirers like dLocal or EBANX can materially lift approvals in markets like Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria, recovering revenue that would otherwise be lost.
• Unlock local card brands global networks don't reach. Orchestration connectors support region-specific schemes — such as Elo/Hipercard, Verve/Afrigo, and Naranja/Cabal/RedCompra — expanding reach to cardholders who can't transact on Visa or Mastercard alone.
• Add redundancy and reduce downtime risk. A multi-PSP setup provides a failover path when one provider has degraded performance or an outage, protecting conversion during incidents.
• Recover revenue from false declines automatically. Integrations like FlexFactor route failed transactions through a real-time decision engine to identify false declines and reattempt via an alternative path, without merchants building their own retry logic.
• Reduce tech debt and avoid PSP lock-in over time. Orchestration centralizes connectivity and makes it easier to add, swap, or expand PSP relationships as needs evolve — across auth, cost, latency, and geo coverage — without rebuilding the payments stack.

Important: You must perform all transaction operations (auth, capture, void, and refund) through Braintree. Calling a connector directly, without going through Braintree, will cause reconciliation errors and synchronization issues.

Available connectors

The following connectors are available. You can enable each connector through your Braintree account, and they require no client-side code changes. For more information, see the guide for each connector that you use.

Next steps

To get started, work with your Braintree account manager (AM) or technical account manager (TAM) to identify which connectors are appropriate for your markets.