Juspay reflects on its journey building Hyperswitch - the world’s first open-source payments orchestration platform for enterprises and brands.
There’s a lot required of enterprise software teams that engineer their payments stack. Constant changes in regulation, consumer preferences and shifts in payment-provider landscape force the enterprise to spend years building and re-engineering proprietary implementations. Business goals like increasing conversions, strengthening customer loyalty, lowering costs, and cutting fraud force the enterprise to constantly switch over to newer more complex integrations, and optimize them.
Companies like Airbnb (Payments at Airbnb Engineering) and Uber (Payments Platform) invest a lot of resources into perfecting their in-house payment operating systems. However, there isn’t a single reference kernel available to engineers globally to easily compose an enduring payments-platform, despite payments being so core to online commerce.
If open source runs nearly all critical software infrastructure – from operating systems to databases – why isn’t it at the heart of enterprise payments?
We believed it had to change.
In 2022 we built and launched Hyperswitch - a PCI-certified open-source version of the Juspay payments orchestrator. Our 12 years of experience building a payment operating system for enterprises that today powers 200 million transactions daily, at scale - unbundled, modularized and open sourced to bring the innovation for the entire world.
The Hyperswitch idea was simple, and inspired by Linux – one of the greatest systems software of all times that became the Internet's foundation, for cloud computing and for operating systems that ran most mobile devices and endpoints. Linux to us was that open operating system approach that made the entire ecosystem of global participants embrace it, trust it and compose diverse applications with it. Such an open source approach we believe would also become pervasive in the payments and fintech world.
How Hyperswitch Works
Hyperswitch is designed as a payments kernel that merchants plug into for payments orchestration and observability. It is fully transparent, interoperable, open source, and modular – designed to increase collaboration and co-creation.
At the core it abstracts diverse functionality – connectors, orchestration-workflows, intelligence, compliance & security -- under a single, coherent architecture. Rather than painstakingly connecting to each new acquirer, fraud mitigation provider, or a local payment method, enterprises integrate Hyperswitch first – either as a whole integration, or in parts – then pick and choose additional pre-integrated modules, and activate workflows to accept payments, optimize success rates and lower costs & fraud.
A closer look at Hyperswitch shows the following functional abstractions:
Connectors
Much like how an OS abstracts peripheral devices, Hyperswitch unifies connections to banks, acquirers, PSPs, card schemes, debit networks, wallets, fraud engines, trust & authentication service providers, vaults, and more so enterprises can work with more than one provider of any given type at any given time, and improve business metrics - redundancy, resiliency, lift conversions, lower costs & chargebacks etc.
Orchestration
Hyperswitch provides a transparent orchestration service (like workflows) to control the business logic and lifecycle of payments. These define, manage, monitor, and/or cascade connectors and/or services into multi-task pipelines that execute the business rules and layers of intelligence to process payments.
Hyperswitch Orchestration includes the following aspects, abstracted across a global ecosystem of third party payment participants:
- Core payment workflows like authentication, authorization, refund processing, etc., and
- Business workflows like selection logic for connectors, etc.
- An Extensibility Layer: This can execute not just native workflows but also invoke workflows or services provided by commercial SaaS service providers, including 3P providers. For example, a subscription merchant can seamlessly connect with their external churn recovery service provider (with zero-code) via Hyperswitch’s Extensibility Layer, and continue to pay SaaS fees directly to their service provider, while managing it via Hyperswitch Payments.
Experience
This includes a unified acquirer-agnostic Checkout SDK with seamless flows across all preferred payment methods, a Payout SDK and a unified Express Checkout frontend for wallets like Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and APMs like Klarna etc. Hyperswitch’s Experience SDKs come with customize-able themes, styles, layout, payment method enablement and ordering rules, offer texts and more and are built on react-native, for iOS, Android and web.
The Hyperswitch Checkout SDK also comes with dynamic assets and dynamic updates, so merchants can roll out updates over the air remotely, and keep up with the changing ecosystem landscape (changing regulation, preferred payment methods and diversity) without forcing the end user for an App upgrade.
Compliance & Security
Hyperswitch plays a crucial role in ensuring compliance and security in the ever-evolving payments landscape. By providing a layer of abstraction, the platform can quickly adapt to changing regulations, data privacy laws, and data residency requirements around the world. This adaptability is vital for businesses operating in multiple jurisdictions, and helps them navigate complex legal frameworks while maintaining a secure payment environment. Additionally, the platform effectively manages strong customer authentication, enhancing security, reducing fraud and chargeback costs, while also being:
- PCI DSS compliant, and
- PCI Secure Software Standards certified – for businesses that want it to be self-installed in their own cloud environment.
A Modular, Composable Platform
Zooming into the higher order abstractions of connectors, workflows, etc., Hyperswitch as a platform is structured into smaller, independent modules, each responsible for a specific function (e.g. how operating systems have file system, memory management, networking, etc.). This makes Hyperswitch easier to understand, maintain, and update, as changes to one module are less likely to affect others.
And like a true operating system, Hyperswitch is designed to allow the enterprise to compose and spin-off multiple point solutions for pertinent business problems, by assembling as many unbundled modules as is required into well architected sub-system(s).
In March 2025, besides the full stack Apache 2.0 platform, Hyperswitch has also launched new Cloud / SaaS propositions for enterprises, built on top of this modular platform, allowing enterprises to access comprehensive point solutions to critical payment-domain problems:
- Cost Observability: Tracking and reducing payment processing costs without adding new PSPs.
- Intelligent Routing: Routing service to dynamically select the most optimal PSP in real time exploring/exploiting/managing multiple objectives simultaneously–across least-cost/debit routing, predictive (auth-rate optimized) routing, volume based routing, and rule based routing etc.
- Revenue/Churn Recovery: An agentic payment recovery sub-system with a customizable retry engine that reduces passive churn to recover failed subscription payments.
- Vault: Simplifying PCI compliance and data privacy regulations through a standalone Card Vault
- Recon: Improving Finops efficiency in multi-acquirer settlement reconciliation through a Reconciliation module
- APM Widgets: Embracing the ever expanding diversity of payment methods and payment experiences through orchestration, and a simple add-on button that requires zero disruption to Checkout.
Flexible Deployment Models to Match Enterprise Preferences
Hyperswitch offers two deployment formats to cater to business needs – giving them varying levels of control, matching the desired agility, letting them balance the effort required to in-source (all or pieces of) a new software platform and their enterprise architecture roadmap of developing internal payment engineering capabilities:
Enterprise Edition - ideal for enterprises looking to insource the payments platform with complete control and data privacy, while being able to leverage expert support, consultation and service guarantee from Juspay. There is also an option to partially outsource modules such as PCI card vault, Network tokenization and 3DS authentication to reduce the compliance burden
Cloud Edition - ideal for enterprises looking for payments orchestration as a fully supported SaaS offering, and get started with a simple integration (typical onboarding and go-live times of two to three weeks). The SaaS offering is flexible in that it offers all of the following benefits:
- Use as a whole service, or in parts - the ability to integrate with the entire payment orchestration stack, or just with a point solution (e.g. Churn/revenue recovery, or just cost observability).
- Accelerate speed to market for future stack upgrades and/or new feature additions: by having Hyperswitch leverage its open & modular posture and a strong 1000 people Engineering team who are able to work with the entire ecosystem of payment providers for rapid collaboration and co-creation.
- Run like system software for critical payments infrastructure: Deployed and scaled for highest system reliability, true redundancy, 99.999% availability and up to 10K TPS.
To eliminate barriers for enterprise developers to use and collaborate, Hyperswitch also offers a wide range of tooling capabilities for easy installation on any cloud provider or on-prem, easy addition of new integrations, pre-built configurable monitoring toolset to track infrastructure metrics and business metrics.
Get started today, on Hyperswitch.io
