One integration to rule them all?

• Payments keeps forging new “Rings” that promise to simplify everything, but many eventually create new forms of dependency and lock-in.

• Modern commerce has become a far bigger, messier version of Middle-earth, with channels, payment methods, devices, and customer journeys all operating under different rules.

• The “Fellowship” approach often works better than relying on one dominant force, with PSPs, acquirers, wallets, loyalty tools, and fraud systems each playing different roles across the journey.

• What begins as a convenient shortcut can eventually lead merchants back to the problem they were trying to escape: another painful migration or re-platform.

• Orchestration is important because it prevents any one Ring from controlling the entire journey, keeping merchants flexible as commerce continues to evolve.

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In Lord of the Rings, the One Ring promised something dangerously seductive: one source of power capable of bringing order to an entire world.

Payments has been chasing its own version of that promise. Every few years, the industry invents a new “one integration” that promises to simplify everything.

• One PSP
• One gateway
• One commerce platform
• One AI layer sitting over the top of it all.

The vendor promise barely changes, as it’s always the same idea: ‘integrate once, remove complexity forever’.

And for a while, it works.

Projects move faster, and vendors consolidate. Rollouts look cleaner, and a merchant that once managed terminals, acquirers, local payment methods, and reporting tools across multiple markets suddenly has one neat relationship instead of fifteen.

But over time, something else happens…

The integration that removed complexity starts creating a different kind of dependency. Flexibility shrinks, roadmaps become harder to influence, and switching becomes far more expensive.

Eventually, merchants find themselves facing the same journey they were promised they would avoid in the first place: another major re-platform, another migration, another painful trip back to Mount Doom because this time, apparently, the new Ring will finally simplify everything for good.

That is the curse of the “one integration” promise: what begins as simplification rarely stays that way, as it slowly turns into lock-in.

In Lord of the Rings, the One Ring was powerful precisely because it promised control. In payments, the industry keeps forging its own versions of that Ring: systems designed to bring everything together, but which eventually become difficult to escape.

To explore why this cycle keeps repeating, Aevi’s in-house payments experts, Peter de Wit, Nadim Ghafoor, Martin Herlinghaus, and Rustem Saitkulov, discuss orchestration, ecosystems, and why modern commerce may simply be too complex for any single stack to rule forever.

But first, a caveat. You don’t have to be a Lord of the Rings fan to understand this - In fact, if you’ve ever been promised a “simple” payment setup that became painfully complicated two years later, you’re already familiar with the plot. 

In LOTR, Middle-earth only works because very different worlds learn how to coexist: kingdoms, alliances, languages, and powers all operating under different rules.

Payments now faces much the same challenge, except the enemy is complexity itself rather than a single force.

What was once a relatively straightforward world of in-store card payments has expanded into a mix of channels, devices, payment methods, and customer journeys that all need to work together.

For years, merchants tolerated fragmented terminals, country-specific integrations, disconnected channels, and rigid hardware dependencies because the complexity simply felt unavoidable.

But over the last decade, that fragmentation has accelerated dramatically.

Merchants now have to support:

• e-commerce
• in-store
• mobile apps
• click-and-collect
• subscriptions
• wallets
• local payment methods
• loyalty systems
• returns across channels

At the same time, the customer journey itself has changed. According to Salesforce, 79% of customers now use multiple channels during their purchasing journey, and expect those interactions to be consistent, while research from Capital One Shopping suggests more than 80% of consumers regularly research online before buying in-store.

The problem is that many payment stacks were built for a world where checkout was easier to define, before it started spreading across more channels, devices, payment methods, and customer touchpoints.

As Nadim Ghafoor, Head of Pre-Sales at Aevi puts it, “People are researching on TikTok and even buying through platforms like that. People are coming to the store just to browse and then buy online.”

That change creates a different kind of pressure. Payments no longer sit at the point of sale, instead flowing through a wider system that connects loyalty, refunds, local acquiring, digital wallets, and customer data across channels.

Some payment environments work brilliantly in tightly controlled enterprise rollouts, but far less well once they encounter the messier realities of omnichannel commerce.

This is often the moment businesses realize they have a payment provider and a payment architecture, and architectures built for one version of Middle-earth do not always adapt easily when the world around them changes.

Part of the problem is that many businesses do not start with a payments strategy at all.

For smaller merchants or younger platforms, payments often begin as a practical decision: what works today, what launches quickly, what removes immediate friction.

That’s a completely rational way to approach it.

As Rustem Saitkulov, Senior Software Engineer at Aevi, points out, “For some merchants, especially businesses with relatively simple payment requirements, a single-provider setup genuinely can work well for a period of time. The problem isn’t that the ‘one integration’ promise is always false, it’s that architectures designed for one stage of growth often struggle once merchants expand into new markets, channels, payment methods, and customer experiences.”

Which begs the question: if you can offer merchants a version of payments that feels simpler, and easier to control, why wouldn’t they reach for it?

That is why Peter de Wit argues merchants need to think less about their current setup and more about the roadmap sitting behind it.

“First of all, you need to establish your own roadmap,” he says. “Where do we stand today? Where do we want to be in three years’ time, in five years’ time? And what company, what platform is able to support that roadmap?”

That change matters because modern payment architecture is increasingly shaped by decisions that only reveal their consequences years later:

Many merchants only discover those constraints once the business has already outgrown the assumptions built into the original stack.

In other words, payment strategy is no longer just about acceptance, as it increasingly shapes how flexible the wider business can remain as commerce evolves around it. 

Martin Herlinghaus describes healthy payment ecosystems in perfectly-pitched political terms.

“Middle-earth is about democracy,” he says.

Healthy payment environments aren’t built around one dominant force, they actually rely on a kind of Fellowship: PSPs, acquirers, issuers, ISVs, wallets, terminals, loyalty systems, fraud tools, and local payment methods all playing different roles across the journey.

None of them are sufficient on their own, but together, they allow modern commerce to function across markets, channels, and customer behaviors that no single provider can fully control.

Some cooperate closely. Some specialize in particular markets. Some solve problems others cannot.

The point here is allowing different systems to work together without collapsing into chaos.

That is where the “one ring” idea becomes dangerous.

The danger is rarely obvious at the beginning. Closed ecosystems are often elegant. They reduce operational overhead. They create consistency. They can genuinely accelerate growth.

But once enough capability sits inside one provider’s world, the familiar problems start emerging from the edges:

• brittle integrations
• slow rollouts
• proprietary dependencies
• forced roadmaps
• painful migrations

…the payments version of orcs, in other words.

And once merchants are deep enough inside that environment, leaving can feel less like switching vendors and more like rebuilding an entire operating model.

The obvious mistake at this point would be to present orchestration as the next Ring: a smarter central platform that finally fixes everything forever.

That is not what orchestration should be.

In fact, the discussion surfaced an uncomfortable but important truth: orchestration itself can become another concentration point if it stops prioritizing openness and flexibility.

“We solve some problems,” Nadim says, “but ultimately then we’re locking them into us.” 

That honesty is important because it exposes the real distinction.

Orchestration only works if it preserves choice.

Good orchestration is designed to prevent ecosystems becoming so emotionally and operationally embedded that merchants feel unable to leave, even when the architecture no longer serves them well. 

Payments has enough Gollum stories already.

The strongest orchestration layers, therefore, are the ones designed to let different ecosystems coexist:

Orchestration, done properly, is not a new ‘Ring’, it’s the thing that stops any one ‘Ring’ from owning the entire journey.

It would be easy to paint open ecosystems as good and closed systems as bad, but real life is more complicated than that.

The modern payments industry exists because tightly governed systems solved genuine trust problems. Card schemes created global frameworks for fraud management, dispute handling, and interoperability long before “open ecosystems” became fashionable language.

And that trust matters.

Consumers use systems they believe will protect them when something goes wrong. Merchants rely on stable frameworks even when those frameworks introduce rigidity elsewhere.

Which means the appeal of the “one integration” never fully disappears. The Ring keeps returning because the underlying problem is real. Commerce really is fragmented. Payments really are complicated. Merchants genuinely do want fewer moving parts.

The tension is that modern commerce increasingly demands both stability and flexibility at the same time, and very few payment environments were designed to balance both well. 

One thing all of the experts agreed on is the notion that, from a merchant/vendor perspective, the gold standard would be to design every integration as if you will one day leave it:

• keep flexibility visible from the beginning
• structure contracts with exits in mind
• avoid burying critical logic in places you cannot move
• choose partners that tolerate coexistence
• build for future markets, not only current ones

Because the real challenge in payments isn’t a case of eliminating complexity forever, more so building systems flexible enough to evolve alongside the businesses using them.

Ultimately, merchants shouldn’t have to play Frodo…

…carrying the burden of another painful migration every few years to simply modernize their payments stack, because in modern commerce, the map will keep changing, and payment environments need enough flexibility to change with it too. 

In Lord of the Rings, Middle-earth only survives because different worlds (aka: The Fellowship) learn how to work together without any one force controlling everything.

Payments may be heading toward the same conclusion.

The future probably doesn’t belong to one Ring, one platform, or one ecosystem ruling them all, it belongs to payment environments designed around coexistence, portability, and the assumption that the map will keep changing. 

Which, thankfully, is a much shorter journey than another trip to Mount Doom.