MAG Insights

For years, merchants have allowed financial institutions and third-party providers to own too much of the credit journey. Customers are redirected, declined, asked to reapply, or shown disconnected options at the most important point in the purchase journey. That creates friction, weakens loyalty, and leaves revenue on the table.

Credit orchestration is built to solve that problem. It gives merchants a way to take back control. It allows them to manage multiple financial products and partners through one intelligent layer, while keeping the customer inside the merchant-owned experience. The result is not just higher approval rates or better checkout conversion. It is also a more personalized, inclusive, and valuable customer relationship.

Merchants are already familiar with orchestration. Payment orchestration connects multiple processors, banks, and payment services through a single technology layer that intelligently routes each transaction without replacing existing infrastructure.

The results have been significant. Merchants using multiple payment gateways consistently achieve higher authorization rates than those relying on a single processor. Smart routing increases approvals, reduces false declines, and recovers revenue that would otherwise be lost. J.P. Morgan's 2026 Payments Outlook notes that orchestration platforms can automatically reroute declined transactions through alternate financial partners until payment is successfully completed.

Rather than managing relationships one provider at a time, merchants increasingly rely on a single orchestration layer to optimize every purchase transaction across all customer touchpoints. Credit orchestration applies these same principles to consumer financing.

While payment infrastructure has matured into a cohesive operating system, most merchant credit programs remain fractured across multiple products or still rely on a single issuing bank and credit product.

When applicants don't qualify, merchants often depend on traditional second-look process, where their customers receive a decline message from the first FI and are then invited to reapply for a separate credit product from the next FI. This process is slow, disconnected, and frequently results in customer abandonment. It disconnects a high number of customers from their purchase experience and suboptimizes one of merchants’ most important profit drivers: retail credit programs.  

For example, according to a January 2025 CFPB report, about 50% of all merchant credit card applications are submitted at checkout and, as we have learned in our own experience working with hundreds of cobrand merchants, between 25% and 85% of those applications are declined. The result: single FI product offerings often hurt more customers than they help.

The same CFPB report also found that retail credit income averaged approximately 8% of gross profits among major merchants between 2018 and 2023, reaching nearly 15% for some retailers. Meanwhile, consumer demand for financing continues to expand. TransUnion reported that new credit card originations reached a record 21.9 million accounts during the fourth quarter of 2025, with growing participation among near-prime and non-prime consumers.

The opportunity isn't shrinking. The infrastructure serving it simply hasn't kept pace. Merchants need their own credit access Platform. Credit orchestration provides it.

Credit orchestration brings the same intelligent decision-making used in payments to financing. Instead of requiring customers to navigate multiple applications or separate financing paths, shoppers complete a single application that simultaneously evaluates each applicant’s fit to multiple credit products, an innovation that transforms traditional “second-look” into “parallel-look”.

Beyond determining a shopper’s eligibility for each product, credit orchestration facilitates presentation of the optimal financing solution for each customer, the merchant, and their FI partners – now and into the future of the customer-merchant relationship. That financing option may include:

The customer experiences one seamless application, one financing decision, and one checkout flow, all without leaving the merchant's environment.

Credit orchestration makes it possible for merchants to deploy optimal financing solutions for their business, i.e. to

For most large merchants, co-branded credit cards remain the foundation of their consumer financing strategy. These programs generate recurring purchase behavior, strengthen customer loyalty, and produce some of merchants’ highest-margin economics.

BNPL also plays an important part in the financing ecosystem. KPMG reports that 67% of merchants expect to offer BNPL within three years, while PYMNTS estimates that U.S. BNPL transaction volume has reached approximately $175 billion annually.

However, relying on a single BNPL provider creates the same limitations merchants have long experienced with single-bank card programs. Every lender has unique underwriting criteria, meaning approval rates are constrained by the credit box of each institution. Credit orchestration removes that limitation by allowing multiple financing providers to participate within a single customer experience. Instead of blindly forcing customers into separate applications, merchants can intelligently match each customer to the financing option best suited to them and best able to impact that merchant’s bottom line.

Credit products are often one of merchants’ most important profit drivers, while financing decisions also influence customer loyalty, future spending, and long-term engagement. Every financing handoff represents both a customer experience risk and a revenue opportunity lost.

Credit orchestration keeps financing inside the merchant's own digital and in-store experience, allowing merchants to own the customer journey from application through purchase, benefiting all constituents in their financing program.

The future of merchant financing isn't simply adding more lenders, buttons or financing products at checkout.

It is about giving merchants the intelligence and infrastructure to control the credit journey, protect their most valuable financial relationships, expand access for more customers, and turn financing into a deeper loyalty and engagement strategy.

The merchants that own this layer will not only approve more customers. They will understand more customers, serve them better, and build stronger long-term relationships.