Not a buzzword. Orchestration is a routing layer + a normalized payment model + a reconciliation spine. Here's the engineering view — and an honest build-vs-buy. Payment orchestration is three things, not one: a provider-agnostic API , a routing layer (retries, cascades, least-cost / best-auth-rate decisions), and a reconciliation spine that ties every attempt back to money that actually moved. You don't need it on day one. You need it the day your codebase grows its third if provider == "X" branch — or the day Finance asks "why don't these two reports match?" "We'll just add acquirer #2 ourselves" is the classic trap: the easy 20% (a second adapter) is visible; the hard 80% (idempotency across providers, webhook fan-in, one settlement model, dispute plumbing) shows up six months later. Build-vs-buy is a real decision with real numbers.…