A new global study has found that the majority of businesses continue to manage payments through disconnected systems and workflows, a practice that limits visibility and control as payment complexity increases.
The findings were published in Corefy’s annual research report, The State of Payment Maturity 2025: A Global Study on Payment Stacks and Orchestration Readiness. Based on 672 completed assessments from businesses worldwide, the research offers a detailed look at how modern payment stacks are evolving.
Fragmentation remains the dominant reality
While the report shows that manual payment handling has been nearly eliminated (falling to just 1.0 per cent), operational maturity still lags behind the complexity that businesses are currently taking on.
According to the data, fragmentation remains the dominant market reality:
- 58.5 per cent of companies currently operate with ‘Fragmented payments’, meaning they run transactions through disconnected providers and tools.
- Only 11.7 per cent of businesses sit in the most advanced segments (categorised as ‘Responsive’ and ‘Agile’), where payments are managed as an adaptive, optimised system.
Moving beyond basic acceptance
The study also indicates a clear shift away from basic, one-step payment acceptance and toward deeper operational capability.
Currently, only 38.5 per cent of businesses rely primarily on basic payment acceptance. In contrast, 23.9 per cent report using complex operational functionality, which includes managing refunds, chargebacks, and analytics.
Furthermore, a smaller but notable share of respondents (8.3 per cent) reports the adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) automation. This suggests that as transaction volumes and performance pressures rise, more teams are beginning to automate their decisioning, monitoring, and exception handling processes.
The rise of multi-provider portfolios
Provider connectivity data from the report illustrates why ‘payments as an operating model’ is becoming a defining reality for the industry.
While one-third of businesses (33.5 per cent) still run on a single provider, multi-provider setups are now increasingly common. In aggregate, 37.1 per cent of businesses now manage portfolios consisting of five or more providers. According to Corefy, this creates an operating environment where routing logic, fallback design, unified reporting, and reconciliation discipline transition into structural requirements.
Denys Kyrychenko, co-founder and CEO at Corefy, commented on the findings:
“The industry has largely solved access to providers. What remains unsolved for many businesses is control. Multi-provider portfolios demand standardised flows, centralised routing logic, and the ability to make changes without rebuilding infrastructure each time.”
Corefy is a global payment orchestration platform designed for online businesses and payment institutions. The platform supports over 600 ready-made integrations with payment service providers and acquirers worldwide, including direct integrations with Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Visa. To date, the infrastructure has processed over 1 billion transactions
