Emre Talay, COO and co-founder of Payrails, unpacks why modern payment systems have become increasingly complex as businesses scale across markets, providers, and payment methods in an interview with CoinsPaid Media. As commerce fragments and customer expectations rise, payments are evolving from simple processing into a multi-layered, mission-critical infrastructure. He explains what’s driving this shift, how companies navigate trade-offs between flexibility, performance, and security, and why modular architecture is becoming foundational for the next generation of payment systems.
The Hidden Complexity Behind a Two-Second Payment
Today, payments seem simple. All it takes is pressing a button. But what actually happens behind the scenes of that transaction?
To be more precise, pressing that payment button takes two seconds for a consumer. For example, you go to a web page or a mobile application, you fill out your payment details, you click the checkout button, and you’re done. But behind the curtain of this transaction, a lot more is happening.
The payment journey begins with collecting the card information securely. Card data is extremely sensitive and requires careful handling. From there, the payment system needs to identify a whole set of attributes to determine how to process the payment. First, it selects the most efficient rails for the transaction (e.g., JPMorgan, Adyen, Checkout, Stripe) through a rule engine. Then it runs a fraud assessment to determine whether the transaction poses any risk. And depending on the context, authentication may be required as well, adding yet another step to the journey.
And the journey doesn’t stop there. Depending on the nature of the business, additional layers come into play. If it’s a marketplace, for instance, you need to ask: does the seller need to go through KYC? Are they already onboarded on the platform? These are questions that must be answered before the transaction can move forward. And if the transaction is a subscription, it gets flagged accordingly, triggering a whole set of downstream integrations: defining the schedule, the interval, and the amount for every subsequent charge.
Once authorization is complete, the work is still not over. You need to configure the capture: do you take the money immediately, or is there a delay? If it’s a cross-border transaction, FX conversion comes into play and needs to be handled carefully. In a marketplace model, you also need to manage revenue allocation between the parties involved and process the payouts. And before you can close the loop, you still need to control your fees and make sure everything is properly reconciled.
I think I can keep telling you more about this journey.
So for a consumer, it’s two seconds. But behind the curtain, so many applications need to be in sync, connected to each other, making sure the order flow is smooth and every single step of the journey is traceable.
If we look at payment infrastructure from a business perspective, what are its core components?
When you think about payment infrastructure from a business perspective, you first need to understand what a business actually runs on, and that is the “order creation”. You cannot imagine a business without one. At the end of the day, it is all about trade: you sell a product or a service, and in exchange, you receive money.
The order is the heartbeat of any business, and payments are what give it life. Without payment confirmation, you cannot deliver. These two are completely inseparable, and that inseparability is what makes payment infrastructure so critical. If the payment infrastructure goes down, your entire ability to create and complete orders goes down with it.
So what must that infrastructure truly be built on? It really comes down to three things: uptime, resilience, and scalability. Everything else flows from there.
What key changes in the architecture of payment systems would you highlight over the past 10 to 15 years?
To understand where payment architecture stands today, you first need to look at where it started. Fifteen years ago, merchants operated in a much simpler world: creating an order meant attaching a payment to it, and that was essentially it. The market was dominated by legacy acquirers offering bundled services, where everything lived inside a single silo. The architecture wasn’t sophisticated, but it didn’t need to be.
Then e-commerce started growing, and as it did, customer behavior evolved with it. Merchants found themselves under pressure to keep their order creation processes constantly up to date, and that pressure reflected directly into payments. The siloed solution that once seemed sufficient was no longer enough. The gaps became impossible to ignore: stronger fraud protection was needed, acquirer coverage had to expand across different markets, and chargeback management required dedicated solutions. Each new requirement exposed a limitation that a single bundled provider simply couldn’t address.
And that is when the real architectural challenge emerged: how do you take the best product and the best provider in each specific domain and stitch them all together into one coherent payment flow? That question, how to build a modular architecture, is essentially what has defined the evolution of payment architecture over the past decade.
Why are modern payment systems becoming increasingly complex? Is it an inevitable result of market development, or a consequence of technological choices?
The answer is both, and the two are impossible to fully separate, as one directly shapes the other.
To understand the market side first: e-commerce has been growing for years, and on top of that foundation, we are now seeing an entirely new wave of change taking shape: AI, agentic systems, new ways of transacting that are fundamentally reshaping how people shop and what they expect from every interaction. And at the core of all of this, one thing remains unchanged: payments without shopping, without an order, are nothing. As I was explaining before, commerce requires an exchange of value, and in our society, that exchange is attached to money. You offer a service or a product, and in return, you get paid. That dynamic is growing, it is changing, it is evolving, and payments cannot be isolated from it.
But market pressure alone does not tell the full story, because technological choices determine how well you absorb that complexity. Whether you build for modularity or lock yourself into a single provider, whether you prioritize flexibility or speed, those decisions determine how well your infrastructure holds up when the pressure builds. In other words, the market forces your hand, but how you respond is entirely up to you.
Scaling Payments in a Fragmented, Multi-Provider World
How has the growing number of payment methods, from bank cards to digital wallets, reshaped the design and capabilities users expect to see?
It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, and it’s worth understanding why.
Users come to a payment experience with expectations: they want it to be fast, familiar, and frictionless. At the same time, payment providers are constantly designing and releasing new solutions, not always in direct response to what customers explicitly asked for, but in anticipation of where this behavior is heading. Over time, both sides meet in the middle, and a new standard emerges: one where frictionless, secure payment experiences become the baseline expectation.
But here’s where it gets interesting for merchants. Every new payment method that enters the market (e.g., a new digital wallet, a local payment scheme, a buy-now-pay-later option, а embedded financial services) comes with its own experience, its own feature set, its own technical requirements, and customers now expect all of them to be available. That means merchants can no longer think of payments as a single integration; they need to stitch together multiple methods, multiple providers, multiple experiences, while making sure none of it bleeds into or disrupts their core business. The only way to do that sustainably is to find an elegant way to abstract the payments layer from the business logic sitting above it.
How does complex payment infrastructure affect companies’ profitability?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer here, as it entirely depends on the size of your business, the complexity of your setup, and what you actually need from your payment infrastructure. In fact, the calculation of profits looks completely different from one company to the next.
Take a small flower shop selling a hundred flowers a day. Stripe is probably all they need, and they’ll be perfectly happy with that. But the moment they start scaling: operating across multiple markets, handling different payment methods, managing fraud, subscriptions, and payouts, they’ll realize that one provider is simply not enough anymore. And that’s when companies find themselves facing a critical decision: do we build something ourselves, or do we buy a solution? That choice alone can define whether your payment infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage or a cost center.
To give you a concrete example: at Delivery Hero, we built a dedicated payments team of 300 people to make the infrastructure profitable at that scale. But that doesn’t mean 300 people is the answer for everyone. Another company might need 50, and even then, it might not be profitable, because the scale of what they need is fundamentally different.
That’s exactly why our role at Payrails is to make this transparent for every merchant we work with: what does profitability look like with Payrails, and without Payrails? Because we never engage with a merchant unless we genuinely believe our value is ROI positive, it has to be profitable for them.
Why do companies today often have to work with several payment solution providers at the same time?
For many companies today, working with a single provider is simply not possible. Payment companies are licensed entities that cannot operate everywhere in the world, as they need to fulfill specific regulatory requirements in each jurisdiction they serve. So if you are running operations across multiple countries, you are pushed to work with multiple partners by default, regardless of preference. That is the fundamental reality of the industry.
Beyond regulatory necessity, there is a second force at play: the desire for control over your own roadmap. When you work exclusively with a single provider, your capabilities are entirely defined by what that provider supports. If they do not offer a specific payment method, for example, Bizum in Spain, you simply cannot offer it to your customers, and you have to go elsewhere. That limitation, multiplied across markets, products, and evolving customer expectations, quickly becomes a real strategic constraint that no serious merchant can afford to ignore.
And then there is the question of performance. Payment providers are not equally strong in every market or context, and the most sophisticated operators understand this well. When I was on the merchant side myself, we used Checkout.com in the Middle East, where they were outstanding, and Adyen in Europe, where they were equally strong. We deliberately selected the best provider for each region, and that balance can shift over time as providers evolve and improve in different markets. A well-architected setup gives you the flexibility to route between providers and switch when one consistently outperforms the other, without disrupting your business.
In sum, when you step back and look at all of this together, it really comes down to two things: coverage and control.
How do companies strike a balance between payment security and user convenience?
The balance looks completely different depending on the nature of the business, and that is the real key insight here. There is no universal formula; what a company optimizes for in payments is a direct reflection of who their customers are, how they transact, and what their risk profile looks like.
Take retail companies, where the majority of volume comes from offline transactions. Their risk appetite tends to be lower, and their priority leans toward security over convenience. The cost of a fraudulent transaction or a security breach outweighs the cost of a slightly more friction-heavy experience. But take a company like Careem, which operates in a very different context entirely. For them, every extra second of friction in the payment journey is a problem to be solved. We have been working with Careem for a long time, and I genuinely keep learning from that partnership. The rigor with which they analyze user experience and the relentless push to make every step of the payment journey more seamless is remarkable.
So, when you ask how companies strike that balance, the real answer is that the best ones don’t try to apply a universal standard. They understand deeply what their customers expect, what their business can tolerate, and then they build their payment experience around that specific reality.
Managing Risk, Fraud, and the Cost of Getting It Wrong
To what extent does fraud prevention add complexity to payment processes?
Every payment you accept without proper fraud safeguards is a risk you are taking with your business. So yes, fraud prevention adds complexity, but that complexity exists for a reason, and the question is rarely whether to embrace it, but how well you manage it.
What I consistently see in the market is that complexity is not being managed well enough. For example, merchants integrate with fraud solution providers, but the results disappoint, and the criticism lands on the fraud provider. However, when you actually look at the integration itself, the problem is almost always the same: the merchant is not feeding enough data. They have underinvested in the integration, and then wonder why the accuracy is not there.
In fact, the more thoughtfully you build that integration — the more relevant data points you feed into the fraud solution — the more accurate and effective it becomes. Feeding the right data is where the real work happens, and the merchants who understand that consistently get better outcomes than those who treat it as a checkbox exercise.
That is precisely where Payrails adds value for our clients. We take on that integration work ourselves, ensuring the right data flows to our fraud partners in the right way, so that merchants do not have to manage it directly, but still benefit fully from the results it produces.
Is it possible to simplify a payment system without sacrificing efficiency and security?
Simplification is absolutely possible, but there is one principle that must remain completely non-negotiable throughout that process, and that is security. You can streamline workflows, reduce friction, consolidate tooling, and make the system easier to operate. What you cannot do is treat security as a variable in that equation.
The reason I feel so strongly about this comes down to something fundamental about the nature of payments. In most industries, mistakes are recoverable: in marketing technology, you run a flawed campaign, and you learn from it; in HR technology, you make a process error, and you fix it. But in payments, the tolerance for mistakes is zero. A security breach, a failed transaction at scale, and a compliance gap are existential risks.
That is why at Payrails, when we sign SLAs with our clients, we commit to four or five nines (99.999% uptime). And what often surprises our clients is that they are not operating at that standard themselves, because payments is not their core business. When they see our uptime numbers and the control measures we have put in place, they are genuinely taken aback.
Because payments demand a level of rigor that most industries simply do not require. You can simplify everything around it, but that foundation cannot be touched.
What mistakes do fast-growing companies most often make when building their payment infrastructure?
When I look at fast-growing companies, I would not frame their early decisions as mistakes, and I say that with full conviction because if I were founding a company today, I would do exactly the same thing. You pick one provider, you move fast, you validate your business. That is the right call at that stage.
Where I do see companies leaving themselves exposed, though, is on the commercial side of those early contracts. When you are moving fast, it is easy to overlook the safeguards that protect you later. Take a subscription business, for example: from day one, you should have a clause in your contract stating that if you ever decide to move providers, they will support your token migration within a defined timeframe. The same principle applies to fraud solution providers; if you switch, they should be contractually obligated to transfer your historical data to the new provider. That data represents years of pattern recognition and model training, and without it, you are starting from zero.
The decisions these companies make are not wrong. The speed, the simplicity, the focus on getting to market, all of that is correct. The opportunity they often miss is building enough contractual flexibility from the beginning, so that when the time comes to scale and diversify their infrastructure, they are not locked in and have the freedom to move.
The Future of Payments Is Modular, Intelligent, and Invisible
What changes in payment infrastructure do you expect to see over the next 5 years?
The direction is clear, and at Payrails, we have been saying it for years: the future of payment infrastructure is modular. When we built Payrails, modularity was the foundational belief behind every architectural decision we made. Here, the era of bundled, siloed payment solutions is giving way to a world where merchants want to pick the best provider for each specific need, stitch them together intelligently, and retain full control over how their infrastructure evolves.
What I find particularly telling is that the narrative across the industry is now shifting in that direction of modularity. Competitors who previously positioned themselves as all-in-one solutions are rebranding as operating systems and modular platforms. I am genuinely proud to see that, as it validates what we have believed from the beginning. It means the market has arrived at the same conclusion as us: merchants are no longer willing to be constrained by a single provider’s roadmap. They want flexibility, interoperability, and the ability to adapt as the world around them changes.
That shift will only accelerate over the next five, ten, or twenty years. The companies that build for modularity today will be the ones best positioned to absorb whatever comes next, whether that is new payment methods, new regulations, or entirely new ways of transacting that we cannot yet predict.
In your view, what will the payment systems of the future look like? Will they become simpler for businesses and users?
To answer that question properly, you first need to zoom out and look at what payments actually are within a business. Payments do not exist in isolation; they are deeply intertwined with every system a business runs on. For example, when an order is created, it touches marketing, CRM, finance, and operations. There might be a cashback attached to this order, a discount, a loyalty point, a refund, and a communication to the issuing bank to trigger a reward. Every single one of those systems is affected by the journey of that payment, whether they know it or not.
Today, keeping all of those systems in sync requires enormous effort: data needs to flow between platforms, databases need to be reconciled, and the payment layer needs to communicate with systems that were never designed to speak the same language. That is where much of the complexity in modern payment infrastructure actually comes from.
What I see changing in the future is that AI takes over the communication between all these components, making the complexity invisible. When a payment flows through a business, every system it touches gets informed automatically, at exactly the right time, with exactly the information it needs. From that moment on, marketing, CRM, finance, and operations will each automatically receive exactly what they need to know, without any manual intervention. No manual syncing, no reconciliation gaps, no latency between the payment event and the business response.
That is the vision we are building at Payrails: the infrastructure where payments are intelligently connected to every part of the business they touch. And when that becomes the standard, yes, running payments will feel genuinely simple for businesses and users alike.
This is the future I am envisioning.
