The fragmentation problem: what a payments stack assembled from four or five vendors really costs

Most payments operations run on a stack that was assembled rather than bought - a processor from one supplier, a gateway from another, 3DS somewhere else, a token vault, wallet integrations. Each with its own contract, its own roadmap, its own support queue.

That made sense when it was built. What has changed is the cost of keeping it. Engineering capacity goes to maintenance instead of product. Launch dates are set by the slowest vendor in the chain. And when something breaks, no single party owns the fix.

It never appears as a line item anywhere, which is why most teams have never added it up.

Join Gabriel Stefanak and Oleg Grinko of DECTA, with Yuriy Kostenko of Flagship Advisory Partners, for a straightforward conversation about where that cost actually sits, how to total it for your own setup and what changes when the core comes from one provider.