Canada's payment landscape has a few characteristics that shape how merchants should think about orchestration:
- Cross-border transactions into the US are constant for many merchants, and every one of those carries a hidden FX markup embedded in the conversion rate.
- The Retail Payment Activities Act (RPAA), which came into full effect in September 2025, now requires all payment service providers operating in Canada to register with the Bank of Canada and maintain risk management and fund safeguarding frameworks.
- Peak periods like Boxing Day and Black Friday concentrate a high share of annual revenue into short windows for many merchants, where a processor outage means significant lost sales.
A payment orchestration platform can help you manage all of these from a single integration. Here's what to look for and which platforms are worth evaluating in 2026:
What Canadian merchants should look for in payment orchestration software
When choosing a payment orchestration platform as a Canadian merchant, here’s what you should look for:
- USD/CAD cost visibility. FX markup on cross-border transactions is embedded in the conversion rate instead of being broken out as an individual line item. You need a platform that standardizes cost reporting across processors so you can see what you're actually paying.
- Cross-border routing. A Canadian-issued card routed to a local Canadian acquirer will typically have lower interchange and higher approval rates than the same card routed through a US-based processor, because issuing banks apply less conservative fraud scoring when the acquirer is in the same country. Your platform should let you route by the issuing country without code.
- Peak period resilience. Automated fallbacks with 3D Secure (3DS) portability. 3DS is the step where customers verify their identity with their bank and making that step portable means failed transactions during peak sales periods will retry with a secondary processor without the customer needing to re-authenticate.
- RPAA compliance for your processors. Since September 2025, payment service providers (PSPs) operating in Canada need to be registered with the Bank of Canada. This applies to the PSPs processing your transactions, such as Stripe or Adyen. Verify that your connected processors are registered.
"FX isn't listed anywhere as a cost of a payment. You're not paying it at the end of the month or the end of a period, and it doesn't show up on the settlement report from your processor. It's embedded in the conversion, so you need the capacity and the expertise to go in and compare it to the mid-market rate at a point in time." — Ali Al Bajati, Product Manager
Let’s look at some of the top options you may want to consider.
Primer
This is our blog, so we'll go first.
Primer is a Unified Payments Infrastructure platform that lets merchants connect providers, orchestrate payment flows, and manage their broader payments stack through a single integration.
Key features include:
- Primer 3DS: Runs authentication above the processor layer, using our agnostic token vault, so if a payment fails during a peak period and retries with a secondary processor, the customer doesn't have to verify their identity again.
- Workflows: No-code payment method integrations and routing rules based on issuing country, card type, BIN range, currency, or transaction value. You can route Canadian-issued cards to a local acquirer and US-issued cards to a US acquirer, likely reducing your fees in the process.
- Costs Overview: Pulls settlement data from every connected processor into one format, displaying fees as absolute amounts and as a percentage of total processed volume. This is where hidden FX costs on USD/CAD conversions become more easily visible, so you can understand how these fees are impacting your bottom line and optimize routing strategically.
- Fallbacks: Failed transactions automatically reroute to a secondary processor. Combined with agnostic 3DS, this means outages during peak sales periods don't translate into permanently lost revenue.
Spreedly
Spreedly connects to 120+ payment gateways through a single API. Spreedly has a strong North American presence and supports major Canadian payment methods through its gateway connections.
Payrails
Payrails is built around configurable workflows and AI-powered routing. It uses machine learning to optimize retry timing based on issuer behavior rather than retrying on a fixed schedule. Payrails also has an agnostic token vault and supports network tokenization, so stored card credentials update automatically when cards expire.
Choose the right payment orchestration software for your Canadian business
Canada's combination of constant USD/CAD cross-border transactions, RPAA compliance requirements, and concentrated peak periods means your orchestration platform needs to handle more than basic processor connectivity.
Primer gives Canadian merchants agnostic 3DS, no-code routing, cost visibility across processors from a single integration, and connections to multiple RPAA-registered PSPs.
Book a demo to see how Primer handles cross-border routing, cost visibility, and peak period fallbacks for Canadian merchants.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about payment orchestration for Canadian merchants
What is the RPAA and how does it affect Canadian merchants?
The Retail Payment Activities Act requires all payment service providers (PSPs) operating in Canada to register with the Bank of Canada and maintain risk management and fund safeguarding frameworks. It came into full effect in September 2025.
As a merchant, you don't need to register yourself, but you should verify that your payment providers are registered.
How does FX markup work on CAD/USD transactions?
When processing CAD/USD transactions, your PSP converts each cross-border transaction to your operating currency and adds a markup to the conversion rate. That markup doesn't appear as a line item on your settlement report. Understanding the true cost means comparing the rate your PSP applied against the mid-market rate at the time of conversion. This is why payment orchestration platforms like Primer are so essential, as they’ll provide clear visibility into FX fees.
What happens if a processor goes down during a peak sales period?
Without automated fallbacks, a processor outage means the transactions fail and the revenue is lost. However, with an orchestration platform that supports fallbacks and agnostic 3DS, failed transactions reroute to a secondary processor automatically. The customer doesn't have to re-authenticate, so the recovery happens in real time without any manual intervention.
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