In today’s EMI and affordability ecosystem, banks rarely engage directly with every brand. Instead, they work through intermediaries like Payment Aggregators (PA), Payment Gateways (PG), and Payment Orchestrators. These players have become extremely important in scaling partnerships, routing offers, and managing operations efficiently.
Let’s understand the role of each of these players and why banks prefer working through them.
Why Do Banks Need Payment Aggregators, Gateways & Orchestrators?
If a bank wants to run EMI offers with hundreds of brands across online and offline channels, doing everything directly becomes very difficult. Managing integrations, compliance, settlements, customer queries, and offer tracking with each brand individually is complex and time-consuming.
This is where Payment Aggregators, Payment Gateways, and Orchestrators come in. They act as a bridge between banks and brands, making partnerships faster, scalable, and more manageable.
Role of Payment Aggregator (PA) in Bank-Brand Partnerships
A Payment Aggregator is one of the most important intermediaries in the current ecosystem. Here’s what they do:
- Single Point Integration: Brands integrate once with the Payment Aggregator instead of integrating separately with multiple banks.
- Offer Management: The aggregator helps banks push EMI offers to multiple brands through a single platform.
- Settlement & Reconciliation: They handle the collection of payments from customers and settlement to merchants, while also managing bank subvention and refunds.
- Compliance & Onboarding: Aggregators take care of a large part of KYC, documentation, and regulatory requirements for both brands and banks.
- Embedded Finance Enablement: Many modern Payment Aggregators also help banks offer BNPL and EMI solutions at the checkout page.
Example:
When a bank wants to run a No Cost EMI offer during a festive sale, it doesn’t need to talk to 500+ online stores individually. It works with a Payment Aggregator like Razorpay or Cashfree, which already has integrations with these stores. The aggregator pushes the bank’s EMI offer across all partner merchants.
Role of Payment Gateway (PG) in Partnerships
A Payment Gateway is more focused on the technical side of transactions. While Payment Aggregators manage both technology and merchant relationships, Payment Gateways mainly handle the secure transfer of payment information between the customer, merchant, and bank.
In EMI partnerships, Payment Gateways help in:
- Processing EMI transactions smoothly
- Supporting multiple payment methods (cards, UPI, net banking)
- Ensuring secure data flow during EMI authentication
- Helping with technical integration between bank systems and merchant websites
Role of Payment Orchestrator in Modern Partnerships
Payment Orchestrators have become increasingly important, especially for large banks and platforms. An Orchestrator sits on top of multiple Payment Aggregators and Gateways and intelligently routes transactions based on rules defined by the bank or brand.
Key roles of an Orchestrator include:
- Smart Routing: It can route EMI transactions to the best available aggregator or bank partner based on success rate, cost, or offer performance.
- Multi-Provider Management: Brands and banks can work with multiple aggregators through one orchestration layer instead of managing them separately.
- Unified Dashboard: It provides a single view of transactions, offers, and performance across different partners.
- Faster Onboarding: New Payment Aggregators or banks can be added quickly without changing the merchant’s integration.
Key Insight: Orchestrators are becoming the preferred layer for banks that want to work with multiple aggregators without increasing operational complexity.
How Banks Route Offers Through PA, PG & Orchestrators
Instead of directly reaching out to every brand, most banks now follow this flow:
Bank → Payment Aggregator / Orchestrator → Brands & Merchants
This model helps banks in several ways:
- Faster rollout of EMI offers across hundreds of merchants
- Better control and tracking of offer performance
- Reduced operational workload
- Easier reconciliation and reporting
- Ability to work with both large and small merchants through the same partner
Benefits of Using PA, PG & Orchestrators
- Scalability: Banks can run offers at scale without building direct relationships with every brand.
- Speed: New EMI offers can be launched much faster.
- Cost Efficiency: Operational costs reduce because intermediaries handle most of the heavy lifting.
- Better Data & Insights: Aggregators and orchestrators provide detailed reports on offer performance.
- Flexibility: Banks can easily add or remove partners based on performance.
Challenges in Working Through Intermediaries
While these players make partnerships easier, they also bring some challenges:
- Banks sometimes lose direct connect with brands.
- Dependency on the aggregator or orchestrator increases.
- Any issue at the intermediary level can impact multiple bank offers.
- Revenue sharing becomes more complex when multiple parties are involved.
Key Takeaway
Payment Aggregators, Payment Gateways, and Orchestrators have become essential intermediaries in modern bank-brand partnerships. They help banks scale EMI offers quickly, reduce operational complexity, improve offer tracking, and reach a large number of merchants without building direct relationships. While they add an extra layer, the benefits of speed, scale, and efficiency usually outweigh the challenges for most banks.
Note: In the next lesson, we will understand the role of APIPL and how it fits into the overall partnership ecosystem.
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