MPE 2026 Magazine interview with Thomas Gillan after BR-DGE’s MPE Awards 2025 win

Featured in the MPE 2026 Magazine, this interview with Thomas Gillan follows BR-DGE being named Best Payment Orchestration Solution at the MPE Awards 2025, reflecting on the evolution of orchestration and BR-DGE’s role within it.

1. Being recognised as “Best payment orchestration solution” is a huge milestone—what does it mean for BR-DGE?

Being named “Best Payment Orchestration Solution” at the MPE Awards 2025 was a powerful affirmation of BR-DGE’s vision, technology and market momentum. It confirmed that what we’re building is truly delivering value in practice for merchants and the wider payments ecosystem

We believe that orchestration has evolved beyond a buzzword into real, strategic infrastructure. The award demonstrates that BR-DGE is at the forefront of this shift, leading with a modular, independent platform built for scale.

It also gives us momentum to broaden our impact: continuing to innovate around tokenisation, connectivity, routing and merchant experience, and proving that orchestration should be a strategic enabler of growth and efficiency, not just another technology layer.

2. Your platform connects merchants to over 100 PSPs and 300+ APMs—how does this breadth of integration benefit your clients?

It gives them the freedom to build for what’s next, without breaking what works today. Through a single API connection, our clients gain immediate access to a global ecosystem of hundreds of PSPs, APMs, fraud tools, and more. This enables them to launch in new markets and activate local payment options with minimal effort, significantly reducing the complexity, cost and time typically associated with payments expansion.

Our vendor-agnostic approach ensures true independence. We don’t push merchants toward a specific provider. We empower them to choose, switch and optimise the partners that best fit their commercial, regional and performance needs. That flexibility allows clients to improve conversion, increase resilience and future-proof their payments strategy as their business evolves.

3. How does BR-DGE’s orchestration simplify complex payment operations and improve the overall experience for merchants?

We simplify the complexity of modern payment operations by consolidating fragmented systems and processes into a single, flexible infrastructure, so enterprise merchants no longer need to juggle multiple direct integrations, disparate data sources, or bespoke provider logic.

BR-DGE acts as a single source of truth, offering a unified view of data across the whole payment journey. This centralised reporting empowers merchants to make better decisions based on real-time data regarding failures and acquiring rates. Operationally, our modular infrastructure allows teams to rapidly integrate new services and make incremental performance improvements with ease.

4. Can you share an example of how your routing or tokenisation solutions have added measurable value for a merchant?

In a period of six months alone, our retry engine recovered nearly 200,000 transactions for a single merchant. These transactions would have otherwise failed, saving over £4.7 million in revenue.

We also worked with a major e-commerce platform to implement our agnostic vault, allowing them to centralise their token strategy across multiple providers. The result was immediate stability: they maintained a 92% acceptance rate throughout implementation and now achieve a 97% success rate in token generation, ensuring they can scale without being locked into a single vendor

5. In your view, what’s the next frontier in payment orchestration that businesses should watch closely?

The next frontier is about an intelligent, modular and deeply interoperable payment orchestration infrastructure that goes well beyond basic connectivity and routing. As orchestration becomes core platform infrastructure, businesses should watch for tighter integration of intelligent routing and optimisation, real-time decisioning and predictive analytics that dynamically steer transactions to the best outcomes across cost, region, risk and customer experience.

At the same time, we anticipate orchestration to increasingly unify tokenisation, fraud and risk tools, and cross-border capabilities into seamless flows, making payments smarter, safer and more efficient for merchants operating globally.