Company overview

A digital media group operates a portfolio of SaaS products and digital subscription businesses across different industries. Each product runs its own recurring billing, and the group processes thousands of subscription transactions monthly across several currencies.

The challenge

The company had grown through acquisition, and each product in the portfolio had its own payment processor, billing logic, and token vault. This created several problems:

Tokens were locked inside individual PSPs. If the group wanted to move a product’s billing to a different processor, every stored card had to be re-collected from subscribers. For a subscription business, that means churn.

Failed recurring charges had nowhere to go. When a processor declined a rebill attempt, that was the end of the line. There was no automatic retry through an alternative route and no way to recover the transaction without someone stepping in manually.

Retry schedules were basic. Each product ran its own, with no visibility into what worked across the portfolio. The group suspected they were losing revenue from failed charges that could have been recovered, but had no way to compare results across PSPs.

The operations team spent time reconciling across multiple processor dashboards instead of focusing on growth. The CEO was clear about what they wanted: a managed payments partner, not another piece of software to run internally.

The solution

The group integrated Orchestra across its portfolio, replacing multiple direct PSP integrations with a single orchestration layer.

Orchestra’s unified token vault stores card details independently of any PSP. If the group switches to a new PSP or adds one, every stored card works with it immediately. No re-collection, no subscriber friction.

For recurring billing, Orchestra’s scheduler lets the group configure rebilling rules and timing once, then handles execution automatically. Charges run on schedule without the group’s systems needing to trigger each one. When a charge fails, the system cascades to an alternative processor before the subscriber ever sees a failed payment notice.

Each product in the portfolio can have its own retry schedule. A high-value annual subscription might retry a failed charge sooner and more often than a low-cost monthly plan. Orchestra manages all of them through the same integration.

How it works

The group’s billing systems send charge requests to Orchestra’s REST API. Orchestra sends the transaction to the group’s chosen primary processor. If that processor declines, Orchestra automatically tries the next one in the fallback list the group has configured. All of this happens within a single API call from the group’s perspective.

Subscription tokens are stored in Orchestra’s PCI-certified vault, accessible across all products in the portfolio. When the group onboarded a newly acquired product, they migrated its stored cards into the vault and connected it to their existing processor configuration in under a week.

Outcome

The group now runs all subscription billing through a single integration. Processor changes are operational decisions, not engineering projects. Failed charges get a second and third chance through alternative routes before the subscriber gets a failed payment email. And the operations team has one dashboard instead of four.