• Denys Kyrychenko, Co-Founder & CEO at Corefy


• 23.09.2026 11:45 am
#GlobalPayments

Today, a merchant can accept a payment from a customer on another continent in a few seconds. Finding a provider willing to process those payments can take the same merchant several months.

We can settle a cross-border payment in seconds, tokenize a card across a dozen providers, and route every transaction to the acquirer most likely to approve it. Yet when a business asks the most basic question in this industry, which payment provider will actually work with us?, the answer is still assembled by hand. It comes from provider websites, warm introductions, private chats, and a spreadsheet someone started three markets ago.

After two decades of building payment infrastructure, I have come to see this as one of the most underrated problems in our industry. People do notice it. They have just learned to live with it.

What ‘fit’ means in payments

Consider a subscription software company registered in Estonia, with customers in Brazil and Germany. Its volumes are modest and growing. It needs cards, Pix, SEPA Direct Debit, and recurring billing that handles retries properly.

A provider page saying ‘we support Brazil' answers almost none of this company's questions. It needs to know:

• Whether the provider accepts Estonian entities;

• How it treats subscription businesses;

• Whether wallets and cards can run through the same account;

• Which currencies it settles in;

• Whether a short processing history will count against it.

So when people ask me for the best payment provider, I usually have to ask several questions back before I can say anything useful. A provider with an excellent reputation may turn a merchant down within a day because the merchant falls outside its risk policy. The merchant then starts again with the next name on the list.

Provider websites describe products and coverage well. They rarely say which kinds of businesses the provider actually approves, on what terms, and in which markets. Yet that is the information merchants spend most of their time trying to find.

A bigger market with the same old search process

The growth of paytech has given merchants more options: regional specialists, alternative payment methods and new competitors to traditional acquiring banks. Merchants are prepared to use them. Capgemini's World Payments Report 2026 found that 40% of small and mid-sized merchants plan to move to paytech providers within a year. It also found that 69% expect fast and seamless onboarding.

Each new option, though, is another company to research and qualify, and the tools for that research were built for a smaller market:

• Directories list companies.

• Rankings reduce a complex decision to a single score.

• Advice from another merchant can help, but it reflects their jurisdiction, industry, and volumes, which may have little in common with yours.

Merchants have no reliable way to see which providers might suit their particular case and why. They also cannot easily tell which requirements could cause trouble, or what they should confirm with a provider before applying.

The industry has spent years on data standards and interoperability so that payment systems can exchange information. Very little comparable effort has gone into describing the companies that run those systems in a consistent format.

What a better provider search looks like

We built PayAtlas to address this. The platform currently covers more than 1400 payment providers and related paytech companies across 214 countries, 285 payment methods, and 72 industries. A list that long would be of limited use on its own, so most of our work focuses on what you can do with the data. We organize the product in three parts.

Understanding the market. PayAtlas links each provider to the countries it serves, the services it offers, the payment methods it supports, and the industries it works with, along with regulators and other parts of the ecosystem. If you are planning to enter a new country, PayAtlas Insights shows how many providers operate there and which services tend to come with which payment methods. That way you can study the market before you contact anyone. If you run a paytech company, the same data shows where competition is dense and where it is thin.

Narrowing the choice. In PayAtlas Navigator, you enter your business type, geography, and payment requirements and receive a set of providers that may suit you. For each one, Navigator explains why it was included and which factors could affect your onboarding. You can then put two candidates into the provider comparison and review coverage, methods, and capabilities against the same criteria, without switching between websites and sales decks.

Reaching providers. With PayAtlas Connect, you describe your requirements once and share the request with relevant providers. Those that can support your business respond, and you compare their offers in one place instead of repeating the same introductory call with a dozen companies.

What changes for providers when requests are structured

Poor discovery costs providers time too. Their sales and compliance teams handle many inquiries from businesses they could never onboard because of geography, industry, volume, or risk. Some of those inquiries take days to qualify before the mismatch becomes clear.

Take a regional acquirer in Latin America that specializes in iGaming and travel. Through their website contact form, they may receive requests from a European fashion retailer, a US crypto exchange, and a newly launched marketplace with no transaction history. They cannot onboard any of them. Each request still takes someone's time: a reply, a call, or at least a check against the risk policy.

When the same acquirer receives a structured request, they can see upfront where the merchant is registered, what the merchant sells, which countries it targets, and what volumes it expects. Their team can then focus on requests that match their licenses and risk appetite.

When a request arrives through a structured process, providers already know the merchant's business model, target markets, required payment methods, and operational needs, so they can decide quickly whether to engage.

A map of the wider ecosystem

Matching merchants with providers is the first use of this data. Payments involve many connected parties, including providers, acquirers, banks, technology vendors, regulators, payment methods, currencies, industries, consultants and merchants.

Once those relationships are recorded in a structured form, the data can reveal:

• Which markets have too few providers;

• Where competition is growing;

• Which industries struggle most to find payment partners;

• Which capabilities are becoming standard.

The way businesses research suppliers is also shifting. More teams now start with a search engine or an AI assistant before they speak to anyone. These tools can only draw on information that is structured, current, and publicly available. Knowledge kept in private chats and sales presentations never reaches them, so answers miss providers and markets described only there.

Where this leaves the industry

Payments will stay diverse. Regulation differs by country, consumers prefer different methods, and providers specialize in particular industries and risk profiles. This variety lets specialized providers serve businesses that a global platform would overlook, and it is unlikely to disappear.

What can improve is how easily a merchant finds its way through that variety. With good data, a merchant should be able to:

• Search the market;

• Compare real options;

• Understand the reasoning behind a recommendation;

• Contact the right providers without relying on luck or personal connections.

We built PayAtlas for that purpose, because the choice of provider shapes every part of a payment setup that follows.