Beyond payments: Here is how Adyen is helping Prism globally through its unified payments platform

Businesses in India have been actively pursuing their global ambitions. Looking beyond the domestic markets, however, comes with a prerequisite of the ability to execute payments seamlessly-both accepting and getting accepted-across diverse geographies and financial regulations, as well as payment infrastructures. The businesses need to navigate local payment preferences, currencies, regulatory setups, fraud risks, and more.

For India’s PRISM (parent of OYO), a global hospitality platform, this challenge has been particularly pronounced and significant, given the company now spans across over 35 countries, with more than 299K hotels, homes and listings.

PRISM has evolved from an India-focused hospitality business into a global platform, with international markets accounting for the substantial majority of its business. North America and Europe are among its key markets, alongside India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Over 84% of revenue now comes from outside India.


This expansion for PRISM has manifested in payments ceasing to be only a checkout function, and rather turning into a strategic technology layer, underscoring the need for a partner that can blend global scale and local payment capabilities seamlessly.

The fundamental question:

The expansion brought forth the most fundamental question: How does a global company offer payment experiences that are locally relevant, in diverse countries, without having to create a distinct payments ecosystem for every market it enters?

The question might seem a simple one on the face of it, but as we penetrate deeper, it has layers, and every layer was a pain point for PRISM’s global expansion plans.

The pain points:
Fragmentation: As companies scale into different overseas markets, they face highly fragmented localised payment landscapes. The requirement is for a single, unified partner that has reach across diverse international markets, and can offer reliable local acquiring capabilities and support local payment methods.

High Payment Processing Costs: The transactional fees in many international markets are higher than in India. Companies expanding need to optimise. These costs escalate in particular when an entity is confronted with interchange and processing costs in the competitive US market.

Authorisation Rates and Lost Revenue: Lost sales owing to failed authorisation of cards is real in international markets, and OYO faced it firsthand. It impacted guest checkout experiences, and PRISM was looking at maximising the authorisation rates to get hold of the lost revenue.

Chargeback & Fraud Management: Higher transaction values have an impact in a chargeback-defense mechanism as well as fraud mitigation, given transactions remain spread across various direct channels and OTAs.

Besides, there are industry-specific challenges. In the hospitality sector, there is a need to integrate payments with the wider technology stack, including property management systems, channel managers, and dynamic pricing systems-which have traditionally been operating as separate layers.

Agarwal spoke about this challenge too, at the GFF, saying: “the hotel owner has to have a different property management software, a different channel manager, a different dynamic pricing, a different card acceptance system, and they don't talk to each other.”

The Adyen-PRISMO partnership:

The good part: this ‘fundamental’ question was answered well in advance for PRISM, as discussions between Adyen and PRISM started in 2018, and pivoted around providing support to the company’s international ambitions.

Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and Group CEO of PRISM, maintains that the company’s GBVhas now grown to $3.5 billion, while he was speaking at the Global Fintech Fest held recently in Mumbai.

“And a large part of it, almost over 80%, is from the US and Europe. Which means the implications of managing the entire rig sitting out of India is why we need trust and partners,” Agarwal said, adding, “That is how we met.”

By the end of 2018, the first implementation of the PRISM-Adyen partnership had gone live, and has since been expanding as the company has been entering more markets.

The timing, Adyen maintains, was significant given PRISM’s global ambitions.

“In 2018, the companies discussed what was required in terms of payments infrastructure for this global expansion. And over the subsequent years, PRISM’s’s footprint has been expanding rapidly on the global stage,” Adyen said.

How did Adyen help PRISM?

Adyen has a single platform approach, which essentially consolidates all local payment structures in an international market, and supports local payment methods as well as acquiring capabilities within a broader global framework. This system, by Adyen, creates greater visibility, especially for a brand like PRISM-a global hospitality business.

Adyen has made life easier for PRISM, particularly in the EU, US and the UK markets where it has banking licenses, and can connect directly with the local payment rails without needing an intermediary. This enables faster movement of funds, and significantly mitigates working-capital challenges specific to the hospitality business.

This partnership between Adyen and PRISM has helped the latter meet its objective of consolidating e-commerce, mobile and in-person POS transactions onto a single platform, while providing a unified view of commerce across channels.

The Adyen model also addresses the challenge of integrating payments with the wider technology stack, and enables the single technology stack to connect with different systems. It reduces operational complexity.

Here is how Adyen operates:
A single platform: More control over end-to-end processes, better visibility into data, which also opens room for optimisation and better performance.

Banking Infrastructure: Fully owned banking licenses across the EU, US, and UK. This bypasses partner bank dependencies and connects Adyen directly to local payment rails.

Dynamic Identification: A behavioral model of trust built from trillions of interactions across Adyen’s single global platform, strengthening with every transaction. It intelligently tells apart legitimate shoppers from sophisticated fraud networks

Intelligent Money Movement: Adyen's unified financial stack allows speed, complete visibility, and unmatched operational efficiency by keeping money flows entirely within a single platform.

Beyond Payments: Adyen’s acquisition of Talon.One (loyalty) and Orb (billing) provide the core building blocks for its newly formed Revenue Optimisation solution, enabling merchants to diversify across the value chain and grow revenue beyond the transaction.

What has Adyen achieved for PRISM thus far?

With its unified platform, global expertise as well as authorisation to work directly with the local payment rails, Adyen has significantly allayed the pain points for PRISM. Not only has the revenue for PRISM been uplifted, but there has been a significant cost-saving as well as streamlining of operations.

Mitigation of risks is another domain in which Adyen has remarkably propelled PRISM in the right direction.

Here is a summary:

Improved authorisation translated into revenue upliftment: PRISM has been leveraging Adyen’s automated optimisation tools, including Network Token Optimisation and risk-based authentication. It has enabled PRISM to increase payment authorisation rates globally and has subsequently helped with an increase in revenue.

Cost Savings: Adyen has ensured there is an implementation of strategic cost-saving measures. One of them is ‘least-cost routing’ for US debit transactions, while identifying opportunities to reduce interchange and card-network fees by implementation of Lodging and AVS data

Supporting Local methods

“In Germany, local payments can't be treated as an add-on. Almost every consumer has a girocard, and they expect to use it. Supporting it for PRISM, on the same platform as everything else, is what makes a global hospitality brand feel local. 38% of the payments in Germany are on Girocards for Prism

Streamlined Omnichannel Operations: Adyen has consolidated e-commerce, mobile, and in-person POS transactions onto a single platform for PRISM with a unified commerce view. This has vastly simplified financial reconciliation, enhanced reporting, and yielded richer customer insights. Since 2025, PRISM has extended its Adyen partnership from online payments into the physical stay, rolling out Adyen’s S1F2 terminals across its premium properties in Europe. In-person payments now sit on the same platform as e-commerce and mobile, giving the group one view of every guest transaction, from booking to check-out.

Supporting with Supplier Payments

“Payments is where we started in 2018. Today we are piloting Issuing with PRISM in the US, so the group can manage how money flows to its franchise properties on the same platform

One for the future:

The partnership between Adyen and Prism is here to stay, as the two companies are now focused on making the guest journey more seamless. That will be achieved through a deeper integration of payments into Prism’s technology stack.

This next phase will include frictionless mobile check-ins and check-outs, enhanced and broadened support for local payment methods, and a deeper integration between Adyen's payments infrastructure and PRISM’s proprietary Property Management System (PMS).

“This integration is aimed at making transactions more unified across the guest journey, through bookings, arrivals, stays, and departures,” Adyen said. “It will also mean that PRISM has greater control over the underlying financial flows.”

He further said that Adyen is keen to collaborate with PRISM and support its entry into newer markets as well as business lines. “Adyen will keep tailoring payments and acquiring setups to local requirements for PRISM,”

A takeaway:

PRISM’s journey from an Indian brand to a global one has brought to focus the fundamental change in the role of payments, as well as a broader shift in global commerce: As Indian companies expand overseas, the payment infrastructure has to be designed in a way where it supports local customer behaviour, optimises conversion, controls cost, and provides financial visibility imperative to operate at scale.

Payments are becoming a part of the infrastructure used by global enterprises to operate and grow.