From payment automation to payment orchestration

In the euro area, the number of non-cash payment transactions in the second half of 2024 rose by 8.6% to 77.6 billion. According to 2025 figures by the European Central Bank, by number of transactions, cards represented 57%, credit transfers 21%, direct debits 15%, and e-money payments 6%.

Those volumes matter because they translate directly into operational load: more transactions, more status updates, more exceptions, and more dependencies across systems and providers. McKinsey describes how the proliferation of players fragments the value chain and increases complexity, despite simpler interfaces.

More digital options, less manageability

Globally, Capgemini estimates that non-cash transaction volumes reached nearly 1.4 trillion in 2023 and forecasts growth to around 2.8 trillion by 2028.At the same time, the payment mix is shifting. McKinsey reports that cash usage continues to decline globally and accounts for 46% of worldwide payments, and that digital wallets represent approximately 30% of global point-of-sale volume.

For many organizations, this creates a practical tension:

• Finance wants faster cash collection, fewer late payments, and consistent follow-up.
• IT and operations want a landscape that stays manageable: fewer brittle point-to-point integrations and fewer single-vendor dependencies.

Why this is not only a payments problem

Modern payment flows are rarely isolated. They touch ERP, invoicing, customer onboarding, customer communication, reporting, and reconciliation.

Digital integration has become easier and more pervasive. Harvard Business Review describes how digital interfaces, especially APIs, make it possible to integrate workflows across organizations, allow systems to interact in real time and reduce coordination costs. It also notes that APIs now power most of the internet traffic.

That ease of integration is valuable, but it does not automatically translate into impact. Harvard Business Review says in another article that while 89% of large companies have a digital and an AI transformation underway, they have captured only 31% of the expected revenue lift and 25% of expected cost savings.

In payments, the “execution gap” often shows up as fragmented tooling, inconsistent status handling across providers, and recurring manual work around failed transactions and reconciliation.

What “payment orchestration” means in practice

Payment orchestration is the intelligent management of payment transactions, routing them through efficient and cost-effective channels, and enabling businesses to switch between multiple payment partners rather than relying on a single provider. From an integration-and-operations view, orchestration is a way to centralize payment-flow logic (routing, retries, failure handling, and feedback loops) so that your core systems don’t need custom behavior per provider.

6 advantages to payment orchestration

1. One future-proof integration

Twikey is built for organizations that want to modernize cash collection without hardwiring every payment decision into their ERP, CRM, or customer portal. With one integration, Twikey is designed to support both today’s and tomorrow’s payment needs: we connect to more than 3,500 banks and integrate with more than 10 payment service providers, so you can add or change payment partners without rebuilding your core flows each time

2. Strong foundations in recurring payments and mandates

That flexibility matters most where the operational impact is highest: recurring payments and collections. In the euro area alone, the ECB reports 11.4 billion direct debits in the second half of 2024, representing €5.4 trillion in value. Yet only 12% of direct debits used an electronic mandate by number (14% by value), which shows how much room still exists to digitize mandate-based collections end-to-end. Twikey focuses exactly on that area: digitizing mandates (e-mandates) and linking them directly to automated collection and follow-up, reducing paperwork and enabling recurring payment journeys that are easier to scale.

3. Orchestration: control and freedom across providers

Twikey is not only about enabling e-mandates (whether they are SEPA Direct Debits or Bacs AUDDIS mandates). The broader value is orchestration and control. Twikey manages transactions intelligently across multiple payment partners and routs them through efficient channels, while keeping your internal systems stable behind one consistent API surface. In practice, that means you can keep ownership of your customer experience and operational process, while retaining the freedom to choose the most suitable PSP, bank, or payment method per context

4. Fewer exceptions, faster recovery

As payment landscapes become more diverse, the exception workload grows unless it is engineered out. Twikey’s failure management module maximizes payment success and minimizes exceptions, supported by configurable actions, automated dunning, fallback methods, and reconciliation support. This helps keep collections operationally predictable, even when transaction volumes rise or payment methods diversify.

5. No lock-in at the integration layer

For engineering and integration teams we explicitly live by a “no lock-in” approach through a payment switch that can switch between payment methods quickly. Twikey is a multichannel solution that can work with one or multiple PSPs and banks and integrates with accounting and CRM packages.

6. Measurable outcomes you can validate

Twikey ties these capabilities back to cashflow outcomes. Twikey reports results from its own customer research, stating that annual ROI is on average 8x the investment, based on research with more than 2,000 Twikey customers, and it publishes before/after metrics on elements such as speed of payment, reconciliation, and automation of collection processes.

What to evaluate in ROI and TCO terms

If you are assessing Twikey (or any orchestration approach) as part of a broader payments operating model, these questions keep the discussion grounded:

• Which payment flows are genuinely “recurring” and which will remain one-time?
• How much are you paying for each payment method?
• Where do failures occur (initiation, authentication, insufficient funds, technical issues), what do these cost and how consistent is your follow-up?
• How much time are you losing with (manual) follow-up?
• How many distinct provider/bank interfaces do you operate today for payments, status tracking, and reconciliation?
• What is your switching cost when pricing changes or when a provider changes capabilities?
• Do your customers want payment methods you’re currently not offering?
• How quickly can you feed reliable payment status back into ERP/accounting and collections workflows?

Capgemini reports (based on a survey of corporate treasury executives) that inefficient cash management (which includes poor forecasting and lack of visibility) costs businesses nearly 7% of revenue annually, translating to billions of dollars in trapped liquidity.

Closing thought

The direction of travel is clear: transaction volumes are rising, cash is declining, and the payments stack is becoming more diverse.

Twikey’s proposition is to combine (1) recurring collections (including SEPA Direct Debit and e-mandates) with (2) orchestration capabilities (multi-provider, multi-method) and (3) operational tooling for follow-up and reconciliation, behind one integration surface.