1. Beyond Orchestration: Stratum and the Future of Payments Agility

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By Craig Worrall,

Founder and CEO

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The payments landscape is in constant motion. New schemes, evolving customer expectations, and relentless pressure to innovate demand true agility. For businesses reliant on robust payment systems, the question isn't if you'll need to adapt, but how efficiently?

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The Limits of Current Agility

For decades, payments suffered under slow-moving, costly legacy platforms. More recently, payments orchestration emerged as the modern solution, promising control via APIs or dashboards. While a step forward, it still means configuring rules within a pre-defined framework.

You're essentially setting up a fixed, or at best, non-differentiated set of processing rules. This caps your innovation at the platform's capabilities, not your own. You remain locked into a solution that might not meet your unique requirements.

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Introducing Stratum: The Platform for Any Payments Hub, Switch or Gateway

This is where Stratum diverges fundamentally. It is not merely an orchestration platform, but a universal payments architecture - defined by a set of powerful core abstractions. These abstractions form the foundation for building any type of hub, switch or gateway, offering unprecedented flexibility in how you manage connectivity, enforce security, apply validations, and express transactional logic. Whether it's card payments, account to account payments or any payment hub application, Stratum handles any workload seamlessly. Your team gains the ability to define, implement and rapidly iterate on any requirement, no matter how unique.

Stratum empowers you to:

• Never be locked in → Your systems evolve precisely with your needs.
• Offer differentiating features: Go beyond commodity services.
• Achieve rapid time-to-market: Deploy capabilities quickly.
• Reduce total cost of ownership: Implement sophisticated systems with fewer resources.

Wouldn’t you rather operate a system that evolves as your business does?

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Agility Without Complexity

"Unprecedented flexibility sounds powerful, but isn't it complex and resource-intensive to implement?"

That's a fair concern, given historical payment system builds. But this is exactly where Stratum delivers a breakthrough: its architecture simplifies integration complexity, accelerates development, and reduces resourcing requirements.

In fact, Transacumen recently used Stratum to build a custom regional switch for a global processor - with a comparatively tiny team. 

The result? Lower implementation costs, faster launches, and freed-up engineering talent for your strategic initiatives. This isn’t theoretical; it’s proven.

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This post is the first in a series exploring Stratum’s unique architecture and how it enables the rapid implementation of enterprise-grade transaction hubs, switches and gateways. In upcoming posts, I’ll share further insights into the design principles behind Stratum, how it moves beyond the constraints of both monolithic and micro-services based software and why we believe this model represents the future of agile payments infrastructure.

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