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Hexploits

Product engineering

Payment gateways, routing and orchestration

Payment orchestration is a layer between a business and its payment providers that routes each transaction to the acquirer or method most likely to succeed at the lowest cost, retries intelligently when it fails, and reports on all of it in one place. Hexploits builds and integrates orchestration for businesses that have outgrown a single gateway: multiple acquirers, multiple markets, local payment methods, and a finance team that wants one reconciliation rather than five.

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Who this is for

  • Merchants and platforms processing across several markets, currencies or acquirers.
  • Businesses whose authorisation rate or processing cost has become a board-level number.
  • Firms evaluating an orchestration platform against building the routing themselves.
  • Finance teams reconciling several gateways by hand.

What you get

Deliverables, not slogans. Each one appears in the statement of work.

  • A routing layer, built or configured on an orchestration platform, with rules for acquirer selection by market, method, card type, amount and risk.
  • Smart retries and cascading: a declined authorisation retried on a second acquirer or method where the rules allow, with the cost of each retry known.
  • Network tokenisation and account updater integration so stored credentials keep working when cards are reissued.
  • Local payment methods added per market behind the same interface, without changes to checkout.
  • A single reconciliation and reporting model across every gateway and acquirer, with fees and interchange broken out.
  • Failover between providers, tested, so a gateway outage is a routing change rather than an incident.

Our engineers work across the major languages, frameworks and cloud platforms. We build on the stack you already run, with technology choices explained in writing before work begins.

How it is delivered

The same four stages as every Hexploits engagement, applied to this capability.

  1. Stage 1

    Discovery

    Two to four weeks. We analyse authorisation rates, decline reasons, fees and interchange by acquirer, method and market, and model what routing would change. Output: a business case with the numbers and a fixed figure or capped estimate.

  2. Stage 2

    Build

    The routing layer or platform integration, connected acquirer by acquirer, with A/B routing to prove each improvement before it is made the default.

  3. Stage 3

    Launch

    Traffic moved by segment with the previous routing available for rollback, and authorisation rate and cost tracked daily against the baseline.

  4. Stage 4

    Operate

    Routing rules tuned as acquirers and markets change, new methods added, and provider outages handled under deployment and monitoring.

Where the team learnt this

Our core team built payment orchestration at Apexx Global before Hexploits

Apexx Global is a market-leading payment orchestration platform, routing transactions across acquirers and local payment methods for enterprise merchants. The engineers who built routing, cascading and multi-acquirer reconciliation there lead this work at Hexploits. That experience is also why we will tell you when an orchestration platform is the better answer than building your own.

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How success is measured

Every engagement agrees its measures and the measurement period in writing before work starts.

  • Authorisation rate by market, method and acquirer, measured against the pre-routing baseline.
  • Effective processing cost as a share of volume, including interchange, scheme fees and gateway fees.
  • Recovered revenue from retries and cascading, net of the cost of the retries.
  • Time to add a new acquirer or payment method.

Proof

Case studies with numbers, and reviews linked to Google where they were left there.

98%Faster page loads

Gradvisor · Charity · 8 weeks to production, then ongoing

98% faster page loads and a 12% smaller cloud bill for a UK careers charity

12% lower cloud cost · 2 days to ship a change
75%Under the original budget

swarmd.ai · Software vendor · 6 months

Enterprise AI control plane delivered in six months at 75% under budget for a UK software vendor

75% ahead of the original timeline · 6 months from blank page to paying enterprise customers

  • Director, Gradvisor

    “Fantastic company and our development partner for Gradvisor, a social mobility careers platform with national ambitions. Extremely responsive and mission-oriented. Cameron owns any shortfalls humbly - rare for IT providers. Thinks like a client too.”

    Tushar PrabhuDirector, GradvisorRead the review

  • Director, Lothbury

    “Top quality delivery, and reasonable price. Will be using again.”

    Peter DentonDirector, LothburyRead the review

Questions we get asked

What is payment orchestration?
A single integration in front of several payment providers that decides, per transaction, which acquirer and method to use, retries on failure, and consolidates reporting and reconciliation. It exists because merchants processing across markets found that one gateway could not give them the best authorisation rate and cost everywhere.
Should we build routing or buy an orchestration platform?
Buy when you need many acquirers and local methods quickly and the platform’s fee is small against the authorisation and cost gains. Build when routing logic is a competitive advantage, volumes are very high, or the platforms cannot support your acquirers. We have built the platform side and will give you the answer for your numbers after discovery.
How much can routing improve authorisation rates?
It depends on your current mix. The gains come from matching each transaction to the acquirer with the best performance for that card type and market, retrying soft declines, and keeping stored credentials current with network tokens. We measure the baseline in discovery and prove each change with A/B routing before it becomes the default.
What are network tokens and why do they matter?
Card networks issue a token that stands in for the card number and is updated automatically when the card is reissued. Stored-credential payments using network tokens see fewer declines for expired or replaced cards and often qualify for lower interchange.
Does orchestration affect our PCI DSS scope?
Orchestration platforms typically hold card data on your behalf, keeping your systems out of scope for full assessment. If you build your own routing layer, the tokenisation and vaulting design decides your scope, and we design it to keep card data out of your environment.

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Next step

Request a proposal.

Tell us about the system and the sector. A named engineer replies within one working day. A written scope and an indicative price within two working days of a short scoping call.

Request a proposalTalk to an engineer