By Justin Benson, CEO of Spreedly.
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After years of working with merchants, I’ve noticed that payments keep getting more complicated but not necessarily more effective.
From the outside, our industry seems to be constantly innovating, with new platforms, partnerships, acronyms, and layers. Yet so many of these changes, which look impressive on a slide deck, don’t always improve a company’s bottom line.
Most merchants don’t wake up thinking about payments infrastructure until something breaks. They think about growth, customers, and whether yesterday’s sales turned into revenue. The goal of modern payment infrastructure isn’t just to process transactions; it’s to drive revenue for merchants.
I often think about payments this way: it’s the fastest-moving oil tanker you’ve ever seen. There’s a lot of activity on deck, but the ship itself changes direction slowly. The majority of global transaction volume still relies on the same basic card flows that dominated in the 1990s. Much of what we call innovation today occurs at the edges, not in the underlying economics.
That doesn’t mean progress hasn’t been made. Some advancements have genuinely improved consumer experience and merchant outcomes. But too often, that “innovation” becomes theatrical: more layers, more intermediaries, and more complexity without a corresponding lift in revenue performance.
After years of watching merchants scale and grow across markets, real innovation should be measurable and deliver results: more approvals, fewer false declines, lower cost per approved transaction, stronger uptime, and smoother acceptance across markets. If those outcomes don’t improve, it’s fair to ask what the innovation is really delivering for merchants.
The Cost Reality Merchants Feel Every Day
While the U.S. processes more payment volume than any other market, what matters is the cost per transaction. U.S. merchants consistently pay more per card transaction than their peers in other developed economies, including the EU, Canada, and Australia. Other regions have achieved lower, more predictable costs without sacrificing the consumer experience. But the difference isn’t sophistication, it’s structure.
Industry research from CMSPI estimates that U.S. merchants incurred $224 billion in card acceptance costs in 2023, including $143 billion in interchange costs. Some of that reflects the size of the U.S. economy. But it also points to a system where success gets more expensive.
Most teams don’t set out to build complexity. It accumulates.
First, what happens is that direct acceptance costs scale with every sale. As volume grows, total cost grows proportionally. Success increases expenses rather than improving margin efficiency.
Second, there are the hidden maintenance burdens teams quietly carry. Multi-vendor integrations require constant maintenance. Expanding globally introduces regional payment rules and fragmented tender methods. Revenue leaks through declines that shouldn’t have happened—false declines, soft declines, and retries that never occur—which quietly erode bottom lines. None of this is theoretical. It’s what merchants experience every day as they scale.
For payment infrastructure to drive global revenue, we need to look at improving acceptance and efficiency as merchants grow, not compound costs and complexity with every transaction.
A New Standard for Payments Infrastructure
If we want to move beyond innovation theatre, I believe we need a clearer standard for what progress actually looks like. That starts with what we measure.
Instead of prioritizing feature lists and vendors, merchants and platforms should focus on a small set of revenue-driven metrics:
- Authorization performance, overall and by region, provider, and tender
- Resilience, measured by failover effectiveness and recovery speed
- Global reach without reintegration, including coverage and portability
- Total cost per approved transaction, not just headline processing rates
If you can’t measure cost per approved transaction, you’re not really measuring payment performance. You’re measuring storytelling.
Moving beyond innovation theatre also requires us to be clear on what we need to build.
The infrastructure that actually drives revenue tends to share a few core characteristics: API-first connectivity, provider neutrality, intelligent routing, regional coverage of payment methods, real-time performance visibility, and risk-balanced fraud decisioning.
These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the difference between simply processing payments and actually capturing revenue in a global market.
This is the standard payment companies should build toward: not adding another layer to the stack, but helping merchants turn payments infrastructure into revenue infrastructure. The goal isn’t complexity: it’s results.
From Buzz to Results
From working with merchants over many years, I believe that payment innovation should ultimately be judged by its impact on revenue, not by how impressive it sounds.
That means shifting KPIs from features to performance, vendor sprawl to measurable resilience, and layered complexity to simpler, more effective systems that scale globally.
True innovation is when complexity simplifies, performance increases, and merchants, whether global or local, capture more value with every transaction. That’s the responsibility that comes with building the systems commerce depends on. And as an industry, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to raise that bar. It’s not easy work, but it’s the work that matters.
About the author
Justin Benson is the CEO of Spreedly.
Justin began his career in the Bay Area and joined Intraware as its first technical support employee. He rose through the ranks into sales and senior leadership as the company scaled from 40 to 400 employees, completed a successful IPO, and achieved a strategic exit. He later served as Vice President of Sales for the Americas at SafeNet, an information security company.
Justin lives in North Carolina with his wife and two daughters and can frequently be seen speeding down roads and trails on his bike.
