For a growing online retailer based in the UAE, eager to expand into Saudi Arabia and Egypt, their expansion plans can be more difficult than they expect. 

Each market has unique payment preferences—credit cards, debit cards (like Mada in KSA), popular e-wallets, cash-on-delivery options, and bank transfer networks—alongside entirely different infrastructures, regulations, and consumer behaviors. Very quickly, what sounds like a natural regional expansion can snowball into an operational headache. Different payment providers, inconsistent user experiences, and multiple settlement and reconciliation processes can hamper both performance and profitability.

This fragmented payment landscape is a reality for many businesses operating around MENA. Despite a surging adoption of digital payment methods—MENA boasts over 65% smartphone penetration—a checkout process that fails to accommodate the right payment tools often leads to high cart abandonment rates. Studies show that 40% of consumers in the region will abandon a purchase if their preferred local method isn’t available. With e-commerce in MENA estimated to be a $110B market and growing at a ~10% CAGR, businesses can’t afford to lose these transactions.

While traditional payment providers served as an initial on-ramp to digital commerce, they often struggled to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs of an omnichannel, cross-border economy. That’s where payment orchestration comes in—a modern approach that not only simplifies technical complexity but also helps senior decision-makers more effectively manage performance, reduce costs, and deliver better customer experiences.

Understanding payment orchestration

At its core, payment orchestration is about bringing all your payment connections—gateways, acquirers, methods, and fraud tools—under one unified platform. Rather than building and maintaining several individual integrations, businesses connect just once to the orchestration layer. That layer then routes transactions through the most optimal or cost-effective payment provider, centralizes data and reporting, and helps ensure a consistent experience for both merchants and customers.

A traditional payment gateway integration, by contrast, typically pairs a merchant with a single acquiring bank and a fixed set of payment methods and markets. If you want to accept local wallets (like STC Pay in Saudi Arabia or Fawry in Egypt) or diversify your acquiring partnerships, you’ll likely end up with multiple gateway contracts and disjointed integrations. That means more overhead, a higher risk of errors, and limited flexibility. Orchestration provides a single, dynamic “hub” that can adapt to your business needs. 

Why payment orchestration matters for MENA businesses

Payment orchestration is universally relevant, but it’s especially impactful in MENA, where no single provider covers all countries’ local methods. As digital payments continue to boom—nearly 85% of MENA consumers are open to using new payment options like mobile wallets, and cash-on-delivery has dropped significantly from 41% to 20% of transactions—flexibility is key. That flexibility translates into:

1. Handling fragmentation: Each MENA market has unique requirements. Saudi Arabia’s dominant debit card system (Mada) has higher approval rates if routed through local acquirers. Egypt’s Fawry network processes more than 2.5 million transactions daily and is a must-have for certain online retailers. Orchestration helps businesses swiftly integrate local payment methods via a single interface, reducing time-to-market.

2. Enhancing performance: Payment outages or provider downtime can hit even the most robust networks. Businesses in the region have reported losing thousands of dollars in a single day because of a key gateway going offline. With orchestration, if Provider A experiences downtime, the platform automatically switches to Provider B or C, ensuring minimal disruption. This is in addition to retrying capabilities and ways to engage customers to prevent churn. 

3. Expanding seamlessly: When a merchant from the UAE decides to sell in Morocco or Tunisia, it’s no longer necessary to find and implement a completely new gateway for each region. This unified approach offers consistent user experiences across borders while tailoring local payment options.

These dynamics ensure that performance management—from higher approvals to better cost controls—is the real differentiator in MENA’s quickly maturing digital market.

How payment orchestration can improve payment performance

Although payment orchestration is often seen as a tech solution, its real value emerges in performance management—maximizing successful transactions, minimizing transaction costs, and providing a frictionless customer journey. 

Unified integration for scalability and peak performance

A single integration to an orchestration platform grants access to a host of gateways and acquirers. This architecture doesn’t just reduce development overhead; it inherently increases reliability. Depending on where you’re located, internet connectivity issues and gateway outages can be unpredictable. Orchestration mitigates that risk via built-in failover by automatically rerouting transactions to an alternative payment provider if the primary provider encounters issues such as downtime or connectivity problems.

Optimized checkout for better conversions

Checkout experiences in MENA must address linguistic, cultural, and payment preferences to avoid cart abandonment. For instance, an e-wallet like STC Pay can be a top choice for Saudi millennials, while Egyptian shoppers might prefer Meeza or Fawry. By integrating these options under a single orchestration flow, businesses can seamlessly localize payment pages. This not only improves user satisfaction but also reduces cart abandonment. Some merchants have reported a 5% increase in completed checkouts after rolling out locally tailored payment methods.

Smart transaction routing = lower costs + experimentation

For cross-border payments, orchestration rules can direct each transaction to the acquirer offering the best fee structure or highest approval rate for a specific region or card type. If one local acquirer charges high interchange fees, orchestration can route transactions to a different provider. Over time, these marginal gains add up. Additionally, running A/B tests on multiple providers—without heavy rework—enables data-driven decisions. Studies show that 85% of merchants using multiple acquirers see improved conversion rates, some by over 10%. 

Transaction recovery for higher authorization rates

A “soft decline” can occur due to network lags, temporary fraud checks, or insufficient balance at a specific moment. Instead of failing the payment outright, orchestration platforms can retry or switch providers. This small action can lift approval rates by several percentage points.

Unified data for operational visibility

Operating multiple gateways means juggling different dashboards, reconciliation reports, and settlement processes. Payment orchestration collates all transaction data into a single interface, reducing manual reconciliation. Finance teams can compare approval rates per acquirer, pinpoint problem areas, and track overall performance. This unified data often reveals insights—like identifying which local payment method yields the most loyal customers or which gateway consistently has higher fees. With the region’s e-commerce volume rapidly rising, better visibility can be beneficial for company leaders. 

MoneyHash—the leading payment orchestration provider in MENA

For MENA-based businesses, MoneyHash offers a payment orchestration platform designed with the region’s complexities in mind. We’ve built robust infrastructure around local payment services—such as STC Pay, Fawry, and Mada—and global gateways for merchants to scale their operations, cut costs, and grow revenue.

1. All-in-one integration: A single, flexible API connects your business to dozens of MENA-centric providers. This helps online retailers, subscription services, and fintechs alike to offer localized checkout without investing in multiple, siloed integrations.

2. Performance management tools: MoneyHash emphasizes reliability, data-driven routing, and real-time performance analytics. By analyzing user behaviors and success rates, you can configure your payment flows to minimize declines and optimize costs.

3. Trusted by top companies: MoneyHash supports top companies across the region to improve their payment performance. For example, Foodics, a leading point-of-sale restaurant management solution, leverages MoneyHash’s payment orchestration platform to improve their payment performance, enable in-store QR code payments, and offer restaurants call center solutions for payment processing. Saudi-based buy-no-pay-later unicorn Tamara leverages Moneyhash to minimize failed transactions, optimize payment processing, and ensure seamless operations with a unified payment infrastructure. With over 10M users and 30k merchant partnerships, Tamara chose MoneyHash for our proven track record in solving payment challenges across the region.

From boosting authorization rates to reducing operational overhead, businesses can focus on engaging customers and scaling revenue rather than wrestling with payment infrastructure.

How to get started: improving your payment performance with a payment orchestration platform  

Every time a customer transaction fails, or a user abandons their cart, merchants lose meaningful revenue that otherwise would have—and should have—been captured. This lost revenue becomes exacerbated as you scale internationally. 

Your payment infrastructure is critical to staying competitive with companies across the region as you grow, expand into new product lines, and aim to increase each customer’s lifetime value.  

Here’s how you can get started today with a payment orchestration provider:

• Evaluate your payment processes: Document your existing payment methods, gateways, and any technical integrations. Identify any issues or inefficiencies.

• Contact MoneyHash: Schedule an initial consultation to discuss your specific payment challenges, target markets, and objectives.

• Integrate with our payment infrastructure software: Connect your business to MoneyHash via our API, starting with your initial markets or payment methods.

• Monitor and optimize: Use MoneyHash's analytics tools to regularly review payment data, optimize transaction routing, and improve your conversion rates.

With MoneyHash, businesses can unify their payment operations, integrate local and global providers effortlessly, and future-proof their growth with a single, powerful platform.