A payment layer is the software infrastructure that sits between a platform’s application and the payment service providers (PSPs), acquirers, and banking systems that actually move money. It provides a unified interface — typically a single API — through which the platform can initiate payments, manage refunds, handle disputes, and access transaction data, regardless of which underlying provider is processing any given transaction. The payment layer abstracts away the differences between providers, normalising their varied APIs, data formats, error codes, and settlement behaviours into a consistent experience for the platform.
The concept of a payment layer becomes important when a business outgrows the single-PSP model. Early on, integrating directly with one PSP is straightforward. But as the business expands into new markets, adds new payment methods, or needs better authorisation rates, it inevitably needs multiple providers. Without a payment layer, each new PSP means a new integration, a new set of webhooks to handle, a new reconciliation process, and a new dashboard to monitor. The engineering and operational cost compounds quickly, and the business ends up maintaining a fragmented payments stack that is difficult to manage and slow to change.
A well-designed payment layer solves this by centralising all payment logic in one place. The platform’s application makes a single API call to create a payment, and the layer determines which PSP to route it to, handles tokenization and authentication, manages retries and failover, and returns a normalised response. Reporting and reconciliation are unified across all providers. Adding a new PSP does not require changes to the platform’s codebase — it is a configuration change in the payment layer.
Shuttle Global describes itself as a unified payment layer, and this is the architectural pattern it implements. Platforms integrate with Shuttle’s API once and gain access to over 40 connected PSPs. The payment layer handles everything downstream — routing, tokenization, 3DS authentication, settlement normalisation, and multi-provider failover. Shuttle’s Embedded Payments product exposes this layer as a white-label checkout that platforms can embed directly into their applications. Voice Checkout uses the same layer to process phone payments captured via DTMF masking. Payment Links provide a hosted checkout backed by the same multi-PSP infrastructure. In each case, the platform interacts with one consistent layer while Shuttle manages the complexity of the underlying provider network. This is the core value proposition: the platform gets the flexibility of multiple PSPs with the simplicity of a single integration.