A Conversation With Robert Kraal, Co-Founder at Silverflow On Payment Processing Methods

Why is legacy processing becoming a bottleneck to innovation?

Legacy payment processors were built for a different era of commerce – batch-based, card-centric and relatively static in terms of product and geography. Today’s environment is fundamentally different: real-time payments, global e-commerce and rapidly evolving consumer expectations.

The issue is that many legacy systems are tightly coupled, rigid and slow to adapt. Even small changes – such as adding a new payment method, entering a new market, or supporting a new scheme capability can require long development cycles and significant engineering effort.

As a result, innovation often gets slowed down not by ideas, but by infrastructure. This creates friction for PSPs, acquirers and merchants who need to move quickly to stay competitive. At Silverflow, we see this as the core constraint in payments today: not demand, but the underlying processing architecture.

What is driving the shift to cloud-native, API-first payment infrastructure?

 
The shift is being driven by the need for flexibility, speed and scalability.

Cloud-native, API-first infrastructure allows payment companies to decouple themselves from the limitations of legacy systems. Instead of being constrained by monolithic platforms, they can integrate services modularly, launch new capabilities faster and scale more efficiently across markets.

This approach also supports continuous deployment and real-time updates, which is increasingly important in a world where payment schemes, regulations and consumer preferences evolve quickly.

In short, the industry is moving toward infrastructure that behaves more like modern software: modular, composable and built for iteration.
 

How is acquiring and scheme connectivity being modernised for global scale?

Historically, connecting to card schemes and local payment methods has been complex, fragmented and resource-intensive. Each market often requires bespoke integrations, which creates operational overhead and limits scalability.

Modern infrastructure is changing this by abstracting scheme connectivity into a unified layer. This means PSPs and acquirers can access multiple schemes and local payment methods through a single integration, rather than managing dozens of point-to-point connections.

At scale, this is transformative. It reduces time-to-market for new regions, simplifies operations and allows payment companies to focus more on value-added services rather than infrastructure maintenance.

The broader trend is toward global consistency with local flexibility enabling businesses to scale without rebuilding their stack in every market.

How can merchants and PSPs better navigate a multi-rail payments landscape?

The key challenge in a multi-rail world is complexity. Merchants and PSPs now need to manage cards, real-time payments, account-to-account transfers, wallets and emerging local schemes, often across multiple geographies.

The most effective approach is to prioritise orchestration and abstraction. Rather than integrating and managing each rail individually, organisations benefit from infrastructure that unifies these payment types into a single, intelligent layer.

This enables better routing decisions, improved acceptance rates and greater resilience. It also allows businesses to optimise for cost, speed, or conversion depending on context, rather than being locked into a single payment flow.

Ultimately, success in a multi-rail environment comes down to having infrastructure that turns complexity into choice, without adding operational burden.