Digital payments have become the lifeblood of the global economy, but the systems that support them remain fragmented, brittle, and often reactive. From declined cards to inefficient networks, the failure points in payment infrastructure can trigger a cascade of lost revenue, customer churn, and operational strain.
Too often, small and medium-sized businesses only notice these failures at the point of no return. When a card declines or a subscription cancels, a crucial revenue stream is at risk of being lost forever.
These failure points aren't just technical glitches; they represent systemic weaknesses in how modern commerce operates. As competition intensifies and consumer tolerance for friction drops even lower, the ability to intelligently route, retry, and secure payments has become a defining edge.
A more proactive approach is needed, and product strategist and AI expert Devang Gaur is redefining how payment systems handle transaction failures, routing decisions, and orchestration logic.
With experience leading important payment optimization projects at PayPal and Adobe, and a unique background spanning ML engineering, product strategy, and business modeling, Devang offers a rare systems-level view of the sector.
"I'm particularly interested in developing solutions that democratize access to sophisticated payment optimization," he says.
He has built AI-optimized systems that don't just respond to failure but anticipate it. From a patent-pending retry algorithm for declined card transactions to an orchestration engine that reroutes payments to the most efficient systems, his work offers a glimpse into the next generation of self-optimizing, scalable digital payment infrastructure.
Devang Gaur's Approach to Strengthening the Weak Points of Payment Infrastructure
Many businesses rely on online payments, but they're often powerless when the systems behind them fail. Even worse, these failures are rarely straightforward or easy to fix.
While a product manager at PayPal, Devang identified one such systemic failure: involuntary payment churn.
"The problem occurs when customers unintentionally lose access to services due to payment failures," he explains.
A simple issue like an expired credit card set up as the default payment method for a recurring online subscription causes the customer to lose their subscription and the business to lose the revenue.
Most businesses still treat failed transactions as isolated errors, but Devang saw them as signs of systemic inefficiency. To solve the issue, he led the creation of Smart Retries, which used machine learning to analyze transaction patterns and determine the optimal retry strategy for failed payments. The tool helped businesses improve their payment success rate, increasing their revenue in the process.
"What makes me especially proud is how this system helped to strengthen America's economic foundation," Devang recalls. "By reducing financial volatility for small and medium-sized businesses, Smart Retries helped to preserve jobs, increase economic resilience, and allow businesses to allocate more resources to innovation."
Today, Smart Retries works silently in the background of any small business using PayPal to process payments, helping to ensure financial stability and improve customer satisfaction. Its success has led to a patent application for machine learning-based payment retry optimization that is currently pending.
When most small businesses process payments, they don't have the resources or expertise to find the payment processing engine with the lowest fees or highest fraud protection for any given transaction. PayPal's Smart Retries intelligently processes transactions through the most cost-effective payment network in every scenario, helping businesses avoid unnecessary processing fees, network fines, and potential fraud.
Building a Better Subscription Experience at Adobe
In March 2024, Devang moved on to Adobe, where his product management expertise has been invaluable on an even more comprehensive payment-related project focused on improving the way subscription payments work behind the scenes.
His work at Adobe revolves around payment orchestration, a technology that helps to route each transaction through the best possible path. Using machine learning and generative AI, the orchestration engine his team built can decide in real time how to handle different payment methods, banks, currencies, and security rules. If a payment fails or a customer has to switch to a backup payment method, it can decide instantly what to do to keep the payment process running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
A key part of the project was optimizing the engine for security and regulatory requirements. Devang and his team are currently working on their ability to handle nuances like Europe's new PSD2 rules (which are designed to protect consumer identities and finances) as part of the native infrastructure rather than an extra step that slows down the payment or creates extra steps for users.
The optimization engine is the first step toward a vision where payment systems can manage themselves intelligently, adjusting on the fly based on the customer's location, behavior, and device. Above all, it's about making payments just as secure and efficient for small businesses as they are for large ones.
Through his work, tools once available only to large enterprises are already becoming accessible to smaller businesses as well.
Architecting the Future of Payments
In a world where digital payments are foundational to nearly every business model, optimization can no longer be reactive. It must be architected and designed into the infrastructure itself, not layered on top as an afterthought.
That's the principle driving Devang's work; from machine learning engines that work in the background to recover billions in lost transactions to orchestration engines that adapt to real-time conditions for safer and lower-fee payments, he is helping to build the foundation of modern digital payment infrastructure.
By designing his solutions with scale and simplicity in mind, he is ensuring that small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from the same advanced infrastructure as their larger and more powerful counterparts.
It's a vision of a future where every business is on the same footing of revenue optimization and risk reduction. For Devang Gaur, payment infrastructure isn't just about the individual transactions; it's about building trust, continuity, and equity on a global payment scale.
ⓒ 2025 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
