A Conversation With Nakul Kothari, Head of APAC And Middle East At Juspay On Payment Orchestration

Why is payment orchestration becoming essential for global travel and digital commerce?

A flight booking might originate in Singapore, price in USD, settle through a Thai acquirer, and fail because the card was issued in Japan. That’s the reality of travel payments – and it’s why payment orchestration has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must have infrastructure.

For global merchants, especially in travel and digital commerce, the problem isn’t just having multiple payment providers. It’s that each one has different performance characteristics, coverage gaps, and cost structures depending on the market. Without an orchestration layer, you’re flying blind – routing the same way regardless of issuer, acquirer, or geography, and absorbing failure rates that compound directly into lost revenue.

Orchestration brings intelligence to that complexity. Dynamic routing, smart retries, local payment method coverage, real-time monitoring – these aren’t features, they’re the operating system for a merchant that wants to grow globally without rebuilding their payment stack in every market they enter.

How are merchants improving conversion rates through smarter cross-border payment routing?

The single biggest lever most merchants are under-using is routing intelligence. In cross-border transactions, the difference between a 60% and an 90% success rate often comes down to which acquirer processes the transaction – not the customer’s intent or card validity. Yet most merchants still route statically, either by default or by cost.

Smart merchants are changing that. Dynamic routing – where each transaction is evaluated in real-time and sent to the acquirer most likely to approve it based on card BIN, issuer country, transaction value, and historical performance – can move success rates materially within weeks of implementation.

That’s the foundation. On top of it, the levers that compound the gains are: local payment methods that customers actually trust (not just card alternatives), frictionless authentication that doesn’t kill conversions mid-flow, intelligent retry logic for soft declines, BNPL or EMI options for high-value purchases and real time monitoring to identify & fix failure points. In travel specifically, where average order values are high and cart abandonment at checkout is costly, getting all of these right isn’t optimisation – it’s margin.
 

What are the key challenges of merchant onboarding across fragmented APAC markets?

APAC isn’t a single market – it’s fifteen markets wearing the same label. The regulatory environment in Indonesia looks nothing like Singapore’s. Thailand’s preferred payment methods are different from the Philippines’. India has a domestic card network mandate. Japan still runs heavily on convenience store payments and bank transfers. Any merchant trying to expand across the region quickly discovers that a payment stack built for one market will fail in the next.

The specific challenges we see most often: local licensing and compliance requirements that vary not just by country but sometimes by payment method within a country; the need to integrate with local acquirers or wallets that have no global API documentation; and customer-side preferences that diverge sharply from what worked in a merchant’s home market.

The merchants who scale fastest are the ones who don’t try to solve each market individually. A platform that provides a unified integration layer – where local payment methods, acquirers, and compliance requirements are abstracted behind a single API – compresses a 12-month market entry into something far more manageable. That’s the infrastructure bet worth making early.

How are real-time payments and multi-rail ecosystems reshaping checkout performance in the region?

Real-time payment rails – UPI in India, PromptPay in Thailand, PayNow in Singapore, and QRIS in Indonesia – have fundamentally raised the baseline expectation for checkout speed across APAC. Consumers who experience instant settlement domestically don’t accept a three-second card authorisation lag when they travel or shop cross-border. That gap is where merchants are losing transactions they shouldn’t.

The more interesting shift is the emergence of multi-rail strategy. It’s no longer a question of “cards or wallets” – sophisticated merchants are making real-time decisions across card networks, local A2A rails, digital wallets, and BNPL schemes simultaneously. The routing logic becomes: which rail gives this specific customer the fastest, cheapest, most likely-to-succeed path to payment completion?

When that’s done well, checkout performance improves on every dimension – speed, reliability, cost, and conversion. The merchants pulling ahead in APAC right now are the ones who’ve stopped treating payment methods as a compliance checkbox and started treating multi-rail access as a competitive advantage.