For the last two decades, the winning strategy in payments was vertical integration. Build everything yourself, own the entire stack, control every component from gateway to settlement. That era is over.
an article written by Robert Kraal, Co-Founder at Silverflow
The all-in-one platform is dying because it tries to be world-class at too many things simultaneously. Core processing, fraud detection, merchant onboarding, chargeback management, reconciliation, analytics. No single company can excel at all of them.
Banks learned this the hard way. They spent years trying to bundle financial services with payment technology under one roof.
The logic seemed sound. Customers get everything from one provider, we control the entire experience, higher margins.
But being excellent at treasury management doesn’t make you excellent at building payment infrastructure. Being great at credit facilities doesn’t translate to fraud detection expertise. These are fundamentally different skill sets.
The same applies to payment companies trying to build everything. A processor that’s brilliant at authorization routing probably shouldn’t necessarily be building its own fraud engine. A gateway that excels at integrations shouldn’t waste resources on mediocre chargeback tools.
What’s replacing the all-in-one model is specialized excellence with open integration. Companies focus ruthlessly on their core strength and partner for everything else.
This isn’t about being unable to build components. It’s about opportunity cost. Every hour spent building an average fraud tool is an hour not spent perfecting your actual differentiation.
Modern platforms succeed by being exceptional at one or two things and good enough everywhere else through partnerships. Legacy platforms fail by being mediocre at everything because they spread resources too thin.
The market is rewarding focus over sprawl. Clients would rather assemble best-in-class components than accept one vendor’s compromised version of everything.
Specialization wins. The all-in-one platform is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„To be honest I think that Sinaia, your conference, is much better then Davos.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
