🔁 Vlad’s Journey Through the Payments Ecosystem

• Started at Israel's major issuer and acquirer.

• Progressed through different roles across issuers, acquirers, PSPs, and orchestration platforms.

• Played key roles at:

  • Credorax: European acquirer under PSD2.

  • ZooZ (now part of PayU/Rapyd): One of the first payment orchestrators offering global gateway infrastructure.

  • VP product at Gett

🧱 Understanding the Payment Stack

• Payment systems are based on card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.), which license:

  • Issuers: Issue cards to consumers.

  • Acquirers: Enable merchants to accept cards.

• Evolution: Initially only banks could operate; PSD2 opened the field to fintechs and startups.

🧠 Key Challenges for Merchants

1. Cost inefficiency:

   • Startups often default to Stripe or single PSPs without realizing long-term fee inefficiencies.

2. Approval rates & declines:

   • Declined transactions can be optimized — via better routing, retry logic, or new players offering decline recovery and liability protection.

3. Fraud and chargebacks:

   • Merchants risk being blocked by networks due to high chargebacks.

4. Payment orchestration complexity:

   • Many see adding providers as a major integration burden.

🧩 What Is Payment Orchestration?

• Acts as a layer above PSPs to route transactions smartly and optimize:

  • Cost (via local acquiring)

  • Performance (by routing based on geography, issuer, etc.)

• Merchants can define rules (e.g., geo-based routing), though rule definition is often underused or poorly understood.

🧪 AI, Data, and the Future

• AI models — particularly those trained on merchant-level and payment provider-level data — are the next evolution in:

  • Writing smart routing rules

  • Predicting approvals and retries

  • Replacing static logic with dynamic, ML-driven systems

• LLMs like ChatGPT are helpful in guidance, but lack merchant-specific data.

🚕 Mini Case Study: Gett’s Payment Strategy

• Unified user experience: Customers only input card once, usable across all geographies.

• Optimizations include:

  • Multiple acquirers per region

  • Smart pre-authorization models based on customer behavior

  • High approval & smart retry (dunning) systems

• Treats payments as a profit center, not just a cost center.

• Operates with a lean but effective 2-person payments team + regional fraud agents.

💡 Where the Industry Is Heading

• Consolidated orchestration inside PSPs (e.g., Stripe’s internal orchestration capabilities).

• Token sharing between PSPs to improve experience and redundancy.

• On-us transaction models: Stripe, Revolut, etc., moving toward controlling both issuing and acquiring — bypassing traditional networks.

• Open Banking and direct bank-to-bank payments are rising trends threatening traditional card rails.

🎓 Final Takeaway: Payment Education

• Vlad emphasized the need for greater education among CEOs/CFOs:

  • Payments optimization can be a significant revenue lever.

  • Often overlooked in favor of “sexier” growth strategies.

  • Tzachi reinforced this by highlighting direct bottom-line impact of payment optimization — often more powerful than marketing or sales spend.