A payment gateway priced and engineered differently.
PayVizio is a full payment gateway for Indian merchants — same acceptance, checkout, settlements, and payouts you'd expect from any provider, but with a lower effective MDR and a higher success rate because we're not locked to a single acquirer. Here's exactly how we're different from what you're using today.
The landscape
There are three kinds of payment infrastructure in India
Each solves a different problem. Most merchants pick the wrong category for the stage they're at.
Single-acquirer gateways
e.g. most Indian payment gateways
One acquirer means one rate card, one success rate, one outage. Your MDR is whatever they quoted at signup, and when their UPI rail degrades, so does your checkout.
Legacy enterprise platforms
e.g. bank-led and enterprise routing layers
Capable but heavy: long integrations, opaque logic, enterprise-only pricing and onboarding. Most merchants below ₹10Cr/month can't get in the door.
International gateways
e.g. global payment platforms
World-class developer experience, but minimal India coverage. UPI, RBI tokenization, India settlement files, and Indian acquirer-specific quirks aren't first-class.
Where PayVizio sits
A full payment gateway with the multi-acquirer depth of an enterprise platform — lower MDR, higher success rate, and a world-class developer experience, built specifically for Indian rails. No enterprise contract required to start.
Side by side
The honest comparison
Where the category differs, in plain English. We've avoided naming individual competitors — the differences are structural, not vendor-specific.
| Feature | Single-acquirer gateway | Legacy enterprise platform | PayVizio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Effective MDR | One rate card, fixed at signup | Negotiated per contract | Rate-shopped per transaction across acquirers |
| Success rate on a rail outage | Drops with the acquirer | Failover, if configured | Automatic failover + smart retries by default |
| Acquirers covered with one integration | One | Many — usually enterprise-only | Multiple acquirers — for every merchant |
| Setup & annual maintenance fee | Often charged | Enterprise contract minimums | None — pay per successful transaction |
| Routing transparency | N/A | Black-box ML | Rule editor + health-aware scoring you can read |
| PCI-DSS scope on the merchant | Often yes (SAQ-A or higher) | Depends on integration mode | Out-of-scope — card flows redirect to acquirer page |
| Fund custody | Usually held by aggregator | Varies | No custody — acquirer settles directly to your bank |
| Reconciliation across acquirers | Per-gateway only | Yes — usually a separate product | Built-in, auto-matched, discrepancy flagged |
| Time to first live transaction | Days | Weeks to months | Hours with sandbox parity |
| Pricing model | MDR-based, single quote | Enterprise contracts | Free tier + flat per-txn fee on top of acquirer MDR |
| Test mode | Often a separate environment | Mock or staging | `pvz_test_*` keys hit the same gateway as live |
| Webhook reliability | Per-gateway implementation | Yes | HMAC-signed, idempotent, retry queue, replay UI |
Comparison reflects the typical implementation in each category as of 2026. Individual products in each category may differ on specific rows.
What we do differently
Eight choices that change the math
1. Your MDR is a market, not a quote
A single-acquirer gateway quotes you one rate card and you live with it. We hold rates with several acquirers and send each transaction to the cheapest one eligible for it — by method, BIN, network, and amount band. Your blended MDR ends up below any individual quote, and it improves whenever one of our partners sharpens their pricing.
2. Success rate is engineered, not reported
Most gateways show you a success-rate dashboard. We act on it: rails are scored live on authorisation rate, error rate, and latency, circuits open on degradation, traffic fails over to the next healthy acquirer, and soft declines get idempotent retries. The attempts a single gateway would have logged as failures become payments.
3. Routing you can actually read
Some platforms hide routing behind ML so opaque that finance teams can't predict cost or success rate. Our rule engine is plain: priority-ordered conditions on BIN, geography, amount, time, and payment method, plus a weighted split and live health scoring. You can read the decision a transaction made and why.
4. PCI scope is a product decision, not an integration trap
Many gateways pull merchants into PCI-DSS scope the moment card data touches their servers. Our card flow is redirect-only — card data never crosses PayVizio or the merchant. Merchants stay PCI out-of-scope by design, not by accident.
5. No fund custody
We don't sit on your money. Settlement runs acquirer → your bank, with PayVizio enriching the books and reconciling at the end of the cycle. That keeps the regulatory surface, the credit risk, and the float exactly where they belong.
6. Reconciliation is core, not a paid add-on
Legacy platforms sell reconciliation as a separate product. We treat multi-acquirer recon as table stakes — gateway files parsed, ledger-matched, discrepancies flagged automatically, on every plan including free.
7. Developer experience built for speed
OpenAPI spec, SDKs for Node / Go / Java / iOS / React Native / browser, signed and replayable webhooks, an API Playground, and a sandbox that hits the same gateway as live. The integration looks like the dev experience you wish you had.
8. India-first, not India-adapted
UPI Intent / Collect / QR are first-class. RBI tokenization is wired in. Indian settlement formats are parsed natively. India data residency. We didn't bolt India onto a Western product — we built for India and added other geographies as future work.
What we're not
Things we don't claim to be
We'd rather be sharp on what we do than vague on everything. Here's where we'd point you elsewhere.
Not a card acquirer
We are a payment gateway operating across licensed acquirer partners. We don't issue cards or directly acquire transactions — that's what our acquirer partners do.
Not a fraud product
We expose risk hooks and ship sensible defaults (velocity, BIN/geo, ML scorer hook). For specialist fraud needs, integrate a dedicated provider on top.
Not a conversion-optimisation suite
Our checkout is fast and mobile-first, and routing recovers failed attempts — but we don't claim conversion uplift from UI experimentation the way checkout-specialist products do.
Not a no-code product
Payment Links and plugins (Shopify, WooCommerce) exist, but the platform is built API-first. The real value is in the pricing, routing, recon, and reliability layer.
Who this is for
The right fit looks like this
- ✓Indian D2C, SaaS, or marketplace doing ₹50L+/month
- ✓On a single gateway today, feeling SR or MDR ceiling
- ✓Wants reconciliation that doesn't take a finance hire
- ✓Engineering team that values clean APIs and real sandbox parity
- ✓Compliance-aware — wants to stay out of PCI scope
Not the right fit
When to look elsewhere
- –Pre-revenue, no traffic yet — pick any single gateway and revisit at ₹50L/month
- –Need a checkout-conversion product (UI experiments, address autofill optimisations)
- –Need specialist card-not-present fraud beyond rule-based velocity
- –Need full international acquiring out-of-the-box
Want a no-fluff walkthrough?
30 minutes. Your current rate card, your real success rates, and exactly where PayVizio would move both. No slides.