The Deal You Can't Close
The conversation follows a predictable script.
Your platform is in late-stage negotiations with an enterprise customer. The product fits. The pricing works. The technical requirements are met. Then the procurement team asks: "Which payment processor do you use?"
"Stripe."
"We use Worldpay. We have negotiated rates, existing compliance certifications, and a three-year contract. We're not switching."
The deal stalls. Your engineering team scopes a Worldpay integration — three months minimum, plus PCI scope expansion. The enterprise customer isn't willing to wait. The deal dies, or gets delayed until the prospect finds a platform that supports their gateway.
This isn't an edge case. For platforms selling to mid-market and enterprise customers, PSP mandates are one of the most common reasons deals fail to close.
Why Enterprise Customers Mandate Their PSP
It's easy to dismiss PSP mandates as stubbornness. They're not. Enterprise customers have legitimate reasons for requiring specific payment processors:
Negotiated Rates
Large enterprises process millions (or billions) in annual transaction volume. They've negotiated interchange-plus rates, volume discounts, and custom fee structures with their PSP that are significantly better than standard pricing. Switching PSPs means losing these rates and renegotiating from scratch.
Compliance and Certification
In regulated industries — insurance, financial services, healthcare — the payment processor is part of the compliance framework. The PSP has been vetted, approved, and certified as part of the enterprise's compliance posture. Switching introduces audit risk, re-certification requirements, and regulatory review.
Treasury Integration
Enterprise payment flows connect to treasury management systems, ERP platforms, and accounting infrastructure. Settlement files, reconciliation formats, and banking relationships are configured for a specific PSP. Changing the PSP disrupts downstream financial operations.
Contractual Obligations
Multi-year contracts with PSPs often include volume commitments, exclusivity clauses, or minimum transaction thresholds. Breaking these contracts carries financial penalties.
Institutional Knowledge
The enterprise's finance team, engineering team, and operations team know their PSP. They understand its reporting, its dispute processes, its API quirks. Switching means retraining staff and rebuilding institutional knowledge.
Risk Mitigation
Large enterprises are conservative about payment infrastructure changes. Payments are mission-critical — any disruption affects revenue. The perceived risk of switching PSPs often outweighs the perceived benefit of a new software platform.
Where PSP Mandates Show Up
Insurance Platforms
Insurance carriers processing premium payments, renewals, and claims disbursements typically have long-standing PSP relationships. The carrier's compliance team has approved the processor. Regulatory filings reference the payment infrastructure. A platform offering policy management or claims automation can't require the carrier to switch PSPs.
Travel Platforms
Airlines, hotel chains, and tour operators have negotiated payment terms based on their transaction profiles — high average transaction values, multi-currency requirements, specific chargeback handling. A booking platform or travel management system that mandates a single PSP loses deals with operators whose payment infrastructure doesn't align.
Contact Centres and BPOs
Business process outsourcers handle payments on behalf of their clients. Each client may have a different PSP relationship. A contact centre platform that only supports one gateway can serve one client's payment needs — but not the next client's.
ERP and Finance Platforms
Enterprise finance teams integrate payment processing with accounts receivable, cash management, and financial reporting systems. The PSP is a component of a larger financial infrastructure. An invoicing or ERP platform can't ask an enterprise client to rebuild their payment stack.
Shopping Carts and Commerce Engines
Enterprise retailers have existing payment processing agreements, often with regional acquirers for domestic transactions and global PSPs for cross-border. A commerce platform that locks merchants into a single gateway loses retailers who've optimised their payment costs across multiple providers.
The Platform's Dilemma
When an enterprise customer mandates a PSP your platform doesn't support, you have three options:
Option 1: Turn Down the Deal
This is the most common outcome. The platform can't support the customer's required PSP, so the deal doesn't close. The revenue is lost. The customer finds a competitor or builds a workaround.
The cost: Lost revenue, plus the signal it sends to your sales team. Once they've lost a few deals to PSP mandates, they start qualifying out enterprise prospects early — shrinking your addressable market.
Option 2: Build the Integration
Your engineering team scopes and builds an integration with the mandated PSP. This takes 2-6 months depending on the gateway's API complexity, your existing architecture, and PCI considerations.
The cost: Engineering time (2-3 engineers for 2-6 months), expanded PCI scope if the new gateway handles card data differently, ongoing maintenance for a gateway that may serve a single customer, and the same problem recurring with the next enterprise customer who mandates a different PSP.
Option 3: Use PSP-Neutral Infrastructure
Your platform connects to a payment layer that already supports the mandated gateway. The enterprise customer's PSP is configured during onboarding. No engineering project required.
The cost: Transaction fees to the payment layer provider. No build time. No PCI scope expansion. And the next enterprise customer's PSP mandate is handled the same way — configuration, not engineering.
The Compounding Effect
PSP mandates don't happen once. They compound.
Enterprise deal 1: Customer requires Worldpay. You build the integration. Three months, two engineers.
Enterprise deal 2: Customer requires Adyen. Another integration. Three months, two engineers.
Enterprise deal 3: Customer requires Checkout.com. Another integration. Meanwhile, Worldpay has updated their API and your first integration needs maintenance.
Enterprise deal 4: Customer requires a regional acquirer you've never heard of.
Each integration adds:
2-6 months of engineering work
Expanded PCI scope
Ongoing maintenance burden
A new set of webhooks, error handling, and edge cases
A new PSP relationship to manage
By the time you've built four gateway integrations, you have a permanent team maintaining payment infrastructure. Your platform has become a payments company — which was never the plan.
How PSP-Neutral Infrastructure Solves This
A PSP-neutral payment layer pre-integrates with 40+ gateways. When an enterprise customer mandates their PSP, the platform configures that gateway for the customer — no engineering work, no PCI scope change, no new integration to maintain.
The flow:
Enterprise customer says: "We use Worldpay."
Platform configures Worldpay in the payment layer for that customer.
Customer's existing Worldpay credentials are connected during onboarding.
Payments from that customer's end-users route through Worldpay.
Other merchants on the platform continue using their assigned gateways.
All transactions — regardless of gateway — appear in the same dashboard.
What changes: A configuration setting. What doesn't change: The platform's code, PCI scope, merchant experience, or reporting.
The same infrastructure handles the next enterprise customer's PSP mandate, and the one after that. Each is a configuration change, not a project.
The Revenue Implication
Enterprise deals are typically 5-50x the value of SMB customers. A platform that can close enterprise deals by supporting PSP mandates unlocks a fundamentally different revenue tier.
The math is straightforward:
Cost of losing enterprise deals to PSP mandates: $100K-$1M+ per deal in annual contract value
Cost of building each PSP integration: $150K-$300K in engineering resources, plus ongoing maintenance
Cost of PSP-neutral infrastructure: Transaction fees on a per-transaction basis
For most platforms, the revenue from a single enterprise deal that would have been lost covers the entire cost of PSP-neutral infrastructure for a year.
FAQ
How common are enterprise PSP mandates? Very. In our experience, 60-80% of enterprise platform deals involve a PSP preference or mandate. The percentage increases with deal size — the larger the enterprise, the more entrenched their payment infrastructure.
Can't I just ask enterprise customers to use Stripe? You can ask. Most will say no. Enterprise procurement teams evaluate software platforms on whether the platform fits their infrastructure — not the other way around. Asking an enterprise to change their PSP is like asking them to change their bank.
What about Stripe Connect for enterprise? Stripe Connect is excellent — if all your merchants are willing to process through Stripe. Enterprise customers with existing PSP relationships are the specific case where Connect doesn't work. It's not a Stripe limitation in the traditional sense — it's a business model constraint. Stripe wants to be the PSP; PSP-neutral infrastructure lets the merchant choose.
Do PSP mandates apply to small businesses too? Rarely. SMBs typically don't have established PSP relationships and are happy to use whatever gateway the platform provides. PSP mandates are primarily an enterprise phenomenon — which is why they become critical as your platform moves upmarket.
What if the mandated PSP isn't supported? A payment layer with 40+ integrations covers the vast majority of enterprise PSP mandates. For genuinely unusual gateways, the payment layer provider can typically add new integrations based on demand. The important thing is that adding a gateway is the provider's problem, not yours.
[CTA section]
Stop losing enterprise deals to PSP mandates. Shuttle connects your platform to 40+ payment gateways through a single integration. When your enterprise customer says "we use Worldpay" — you say "no problem."
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