Winning the MPE 2025 Award: The People, Product, and Purpose Behind Our Success

Earlier this year, BR-DGE was honoured to receive the Best Payment Orchestration Solution award at the MPE Awards 2025 in Berlin. Held annually as part of the Merchant Payments Ecosystem (MPE) conference, the awards shine a spotlight on the companies driving progress and innovation across the global payments industry.

For over a decade, the MPE Awards have stood as a beacon of credibility, transparency, and innovation in the payments industry. Judged by a panel of independent experts, this recognition reflects not only technological excellence but also genuine impact across the payments value chain.

According to the MPE Awards criteria, the Best Payment Orchestration Solution is awarded to the platform that best integrates and optimises multiple payment providers and methods, empowering businesses to streamline their operations and enhance financial performance.

At BR-DGE, we are proud to have earned this recognition by delivering a powerful, independent orchestration layer that helps merchants scale globally with greater control, flexibility, and resilience.

We sat down with some of our leadership team to reflect on the journey so far, the orchestration opportunity, and what’s next for our platform.

Positioning Orchestration for the Payments Ecosystem: Helen Owen, VP of Marketing

In your view, how does this recognition validate the way BR-DGE communicates its value proposition to the market?

"I think the key thing is how we position orchestration as an enabler and value-driver for the whole payments ecosystem. We really believe that orchestration is not here to add further disruption to the industry, it's here to redefine it for the benefit of the whole value chain; merchants, consumers, acquirers and solution providers. We've built our platform on that premise and we consistently stand by it in how we communicate our value proposition."

What role do industry awards like MPE play in building credibility and differentiation in such a competitive space like payments?

"It's difficult to cut through the noise in a crowded market like payments, particularly when you're competing for airtime against companies that have built big brands over the course of decades. Winning awards that are judged by industry experts, based on the strength of our technology, is so valuable for us as a scaling company. I also think it helps buyers to cut through the noise too - to find the providers in our space that are really dedicated to solving payments challenges and building a successful track record doing it."

A Signal of Market Evolution: Tom Voaden, VP of Commercial

What does this recognition signal about where the payments ecosystem is headed, and BR-DGE’s role within it?

"Orchestration is clearly no longer a concept, it's the reality for a lot of large merchants across Europe and globally, who are choosing to build the payment infrastructure that works for them. BR-DGE is at the forefront of this orchestration adoption drive, as recognised by this MPE award win. True orchestration combined connectivity, routing, tokenisation and checkout customisation, in a completely agnostic way, serving the needs of the merchants and their customers, but also adding value to the payment providers at the same time - this is what BR-DGE is enabling."

Inside the BR-DGE Product Vision: Richard Moore, VP of Product

What does this recognition mean to the product team and their focus on flexibility, scalability, and interoperability in orchestration?

"We're delighted to have our hard work recognised with the award - it shines a spotlight on the incredible product that we’re building and the value that our orchestration platform is bringing to the industry. Orchestration sits at the heart of modern payment flows, providing resilience and optimisation for every payment transaction. Ultimately, this means more successful transactions for merchants and a smooth, frictionless experience for end customers.

The product team at BR-DGE have end customers as our key focus, working to ensure that their experience of payments is as seamless as possible, with a variety of options to suit their needs, personalised to their own preferences, and we work back from there to develop products and technology that enable that user experience."

What are some of the big trends you're seeing in the industry, and how is BR-DGE responding to them?

• Ongoing push towards network tokenisation. BR-DGE Vault is available as a standalone service or as part of our payments flow, to meet our customers’ needs. This allows customers to access a range of tokenisation solutions, including full support for network tokens, through a single, simple integration - and will continue to expand as we explore more services available from the networks.
• Continued adoption of mobile payments. The BR-DGE platform provides a number of options of how to support Apple Pay and Google Pay, including sophisticated support for inspecting the decrypted payload during transaction processing to make business decisions about payment processing.
• APM proliferation. Customer choice is becoming increasingly important during the payment flow, with customers becoming more discerning about the features they are looking for, and the systems that they choose to trust with their data. This is coupled with the drive towards open standards like Open Banking. BR-DGE provides extensive support for alternative payment methods and continues to add more and more connections to our platform.
• Optimisation and resilience. At the heart of orchestration is the resilience of payment services, giving merchants access to failover services to avoid single points of failure in the payments stack. This is core to BR-DGE’s platform. But we couple this with an Advanced Rules engine that gives merchants powerful rules-based optimisation of payments - meaning that payments are not only resilient to failure, but at the same time can be optimised for cost-per-transaction, uptime, acceptance rates, or a variety of other metrics.

Building on the Momentum: Thomas Gillan, CEO of BR-DGE

What does this MPE Award mean to you as the CEO, both personally and in terms of BR-DGE’s long-term vision?

"It’s a great moment for us, not because we’re chasing accolades, but because it reflects real momentum and the huge effort the team puts in each day. It’s also further confirmation that orchestration is moving to the centre stage in payments, and we’re leading that shift with a platform built the right way: independent, modular, and built for scale."

How has the BR-DGE team’s dedication and innovation led to this moment, and what does it say about BR-DGE culture?

"This is entirely down to the team - that’s our biggest differentiator. Execution, pace, the customer care, the relentless focus on solving difficult problems. Our culture is fast-moving, accountable, and customer-obsessed. I'm unapologetic and uncompromising about that. We’ve stayed focused on building something meaningful, and it’s great to see that recognised externally. But more importantly, it speaks to the quality of people we’ve got driving this forward."

What’s next for BR-DGE after this milestone, and how will you continue to push the boundaries of orchestration?

"This is just a step. We’re scaling with tier 1 merchants, expanding into new verticals, and investing in the platform, especially around data, tokenisation, and personalisation. The big opportunity now is to show the market that orchestration isn’t just a bolt-on; it’s a strategic layer that unlocks control, performance, and long-term value. That’s why we’re here."

Looking Ahead: A Payment Orchestration Platform for Global Growth and Connectivity

Winning the 'Best Payment Orchestration Solution' at the MPE 2025 Awards marks an exciting milestone for BR-DGE, but the journey doesn’t stop here.

We’re focused on building technology, connections and relationships that enable all players within the payments ecosystem to scale, break into new markets, introduce innovative features, optimise costs and easily adapt to changing consumer expectations.

As we continue to innovate and expand, our mission remains clear: to push the boundaries of payment technology and redefine the payments ecosystem, powering the next wave of global growth and connectivity.