Many years before I became CEO of XPP, I sat on the other side of this exact decision. As CEO of Fiserv EMS in the Netherlands, I led the selection of a new e-commerce payment gateway, Ginger, long before I ever imagined I’d be part of the team that built it.That gives me an unusual vantage point on the advice in this guide: I've lived the decision it describes, not just written about it.
We needed to replace our inhouse legacy gateway, fast. With a two-month window to deploy in a high-stakes market, time-to-market was non-negotiable. After a rigorous selection process, Ginger won out for a simple reason: it aligned speed, capability, and unit economics. In an industry where these three rarely coexist, it was the pragmatic choice for our growth strategy.
From the outside, a payment gateway looks like a utility. From the inside, it’s a complex discipline of regulatory governance. Between Visa and Mastercard mandates, privacy regulations, and the relentless rigor of annual PCI DSS audits, managing a gateway isn't just "tech work"—it’s a compliance marathon. I quickly realized how much specialized effort is required just to maintain a "baseline" of operations. That is bandwidth you are not spending on your core value proposition.
Here is the reality check: for smaller acquirers and EMIs, compliance and security can routinely cannibalize 50% of your team’s capacity. This isn’t "wasted" effort—it’s critical—but it is massive, non-scalable overhead. Imagine if you could reclaim even half of that bandwidth to focus on product differentiation. That is the essence of the "build vs. buy" debate. Buy the plumbing, and double down on the features that actually win you customers.
Technology makes it easier than ever to build a "basic" gateway. However, in payments, "mostly working" is a failure state. A gateway must function like household plumbing: invisible when it's working, and absolutely catastrophic the moment it isn't. That is a higher reliability threshold than most software is built to clear. Whether evaluating a vendor or deciding to build in-house, you must ask: are you truly prepared to meet that standard?
Building a proprietary gateway is rarely the strategic differentiator it promises to be. True value creation happens further up the stack—in the merchant experience and the service layer, not in the raw infrastructure. I didn't fully grasp that the first time I faced this decision. Looking back, it’s the clearest lesson I’ve learned.
If you're working through this decision yourself, our guide, “How to Choose a Payment Gateway: A Guide for PSPs, Acquirers and EMIs,” covers what we've learned from both sides of it.
