Orchestrating Millions Across the Globe: Reactive Payments at Scale

Abstract

When your platforms expands into markets beyond your own and has ever growing monetization needs, ‘just integrate Stripe’ is easier said than done, here’s how looking at payments as technical orchestration rather than just a feature solves growth bottlenecks.

At scale, businesses drown in fragmented payment gateways, regulatory minefields, and conflicting monetization strategies. With a plethora of payment APIs on the market, balancing cost, compliance, features, and conversion rates becomes a challenge, as there comes a point where the drawbacks of having one provider start to become a limiting factor. The catch? No playbook exists. This talk shares hard-won lessons from integrating several payment methods, gateways and tier one banks, surviving millions of dollars in transactions, and designing architectures that scale without sacrificing agility.

The best part? I’ll end with a live demo of this running in production on Smallpdf, where we built and shipped our in-house reactive frontend orchestration system, now serving tens of millions of users worldwide.