Why payment facilitators exist
A merchant can theoretically connect to more of the payments stack itself. Most do not, because the hard part is not moving a message from point A to point B; it is operating the exceptions around that message at scale.
The merchant is outsourcing complexity
A facilitator can bundle merchant onboarding, identity checks, underwriting, network connectivity, routing, fraud tooling, funding, reconciliation, dispute workflows, reporting, and support. The merchant pays a markup to avoid stitching these functions together internally.
Scale changes the economics
A facilitator spreads compliance, engineering, bank connectivity, and risk infrastructure across many merchants. It can also aggregate volume, learn from broader transaction data, and support new geographies or payment methods once for the entire portfolio.
Why not self-host everything?
Large merchants sometimes do internalize more of the stack when the savings exceed the fixed cost. Even then, they usually keep external partners for acquiring licenses, local payment methods, redundancy, tokenization, fraud data, or network access.
The test for disintermediation
Ask which tasks become commodity software and which still depend on regulated relationships, risk-bearing, proprietary acceptance data, or global distribution. A lower settlement cost does not eliminate every other layer.