For ten years, payment orchestration has been sold the same way. A vendor sits between the merchant and the payment providers, routes transactions, charges a fee per transaction, and accumulates the data. The merchant gets a user interface, a few dashboards, and a contract. That works, until it does not.
The merchants we talk to want three things that the standard SaaS orchestration model cannot deliver. Their data stays in their own cloud. Their routing logic is theirs to evolve. And the orchestration cost matches their volume curve, not the vendor pricing page.
This is what we mean by autonomous payments. The merchant owns the orchestration, runs it inside their own infrastructure, and decides which providers it talks to. The vendor role shifts from middleman to engineer of the substrate.
PayControl, co-founded by DevCode Group and Nathan Salisbury, is built around exactly this thesis. The orchestration runs as code inside the merchant cloud. It supports any payment provider. It uses AI for routing, fraud, and reconciliations. Digital assets are native, not bolted on. The merchant keeps both the data and the optionality.
Why now
Three things changed in the last twenty-four months.
First, the operational maturity of payment teams. Even mid-market merchants now have engineering teams who can run orchestration code, given good defaults and good observability. The we-need-a-vendor-to-do-this-for-us framing is weakening.
Second, the economics. Per-transaction pricing made sense when orchestration was a black box and the vendor took the operational risk. Once the orchestration is your own code, the per-transaction tax stops making sense. The pricing has to track infrastructure, not volume.
Third, AI. The marginal cost of running a smart routing decision, a fraud score, or a reconciliation match is now low enough that an in-house orchestration layer can outperform a vendor pre-trained model on the merchant own data.
The vendor role shifts from middleman to engineer of the substrate.
What launches in Q3
PayControl is operating today, and is the first venture in the group to run on CCDL, our continuous co-development model. The first version includes a merchant-cloud orchestration runtime, deployed inside the merchant AWS, GCP, or on-prem environment, provider-agnostic adapters for the major card schemes, account-to-account rails, and selected digital asset rails, AI-driven routing and fraud scoring, and an observability layer that pipes everything into the merchant existing logs and dashboards.
What we are not building, deliberately, is another payment provider. PayControl talks to providers. It is not one.
The founding team
PayControl is co-founded by DevCode Group and Nathan Salisbury. This is the second time the studio has set out to reshape how merchants connect to payments. We built PaymentIQ inside DevCode Payment, our anchor venture of the first decade. It helped create the orchestration category, and DevCode Payment was acquired by Bambora. PayControl is the next step in that history: orchestration owned and operated by the merchant rather than rented from a vendor.
The studio brings capital, engineering, and operating support. Nathan leads the venture. He has been thinking about merchant-owned payment infrastructure since before it was an obvious idea, and the first engineering hires are in place.
If you run payments at scale, and the autonomous-payments thesis lands, we want to hear from you. The product is operating with a focused group of customers who are shaping the runtime through CCDL.
— Pedro Hansson, Group CEO