Most shoppers never think about the two seconds between tapping “pay” and seeing a confirmation screen. In that gap, software decides which processor handles the charge, screens it for fraud, and routes it for approval. That layer has a name: payment orchestration.
Spain’s market for it is climbing fast. Mordor Intelligence projects the country’s payment-gateway sector will grow from $0.80 billion in 2025 to $3.03 billion by 2031, a yearly rate near 25%. Alejandro Betancourt López holds a position in one of the companies built for exactly this kind of demand.
What Easy Payment Gateway Actually Does
Easy Payment Gateway, founded in 2014 by Alex Capurro, pulls more than 200 payment methods into a single interface, so a merchant can sell across borders without wiring up each processor separately. The company operates in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Gibraltar. Betancourt López and Andreas Mihalovits led a €6 million funding round for the firm, part of a series that has raised roughly €11 million since its founding. Capurro has described the platform as a way to “start selling quickly and easily in new markets,” with local payment methods built in.
Orchestration is the plumbing beneath a checkout page. It picks the cheapest reliable route for each transaction, retries a charge that fails the first time, and applies fraud screening before money clears. Merchants adopt it because higher approval rates and lower processing costs land straight on the bottom line. Mordor’s analysis notes that API-based gateways increasingly let merchants route traffic dynamically between acquirers for the best mix of cost and reliability, which is orchestration by another name.
Why the Spanish Market Took Off
Several forces are pushing Spanish payments toward this software at once. Bizum, the bank-backed instant-payment service, reaches about 26 million users, close to 60% of the country’s banked population, and now sits behind nearly half of all account-to-account transactions. A rule that took effect in early 2025 requires credit transfers to settle in ten seconds or less, and Spain already runs well ahead of the rest of the bloc, processing 53% of credit transfers instantly against an EU average near 15%.
Government money is widening the base of merchants who need a gateway at all. Spain’s Kit Digital program, funded with roughly €3.07 billion, has approved more than 500,000 grants to help small firms set up e-commerce and billing tools. As more micro-merchants come online, the software that routes and screens their payments grows more valuable with them.
Friction and competition are rising together. Stronger authentication rules under European law can cut completed transactions by up to 20% when applied bluntly, which pushes merchants toward gateways smart enough to challenge only risky payments. Cards still held about 44% of the market in 2025, but digital wallets are growing at a 27% annual rate, the domestic processor Redsys cleared 19.7 billion transactions worth €505 billion in 2024, and a bank-backed scheme called Wero is preparing to enter Spain. For a merchant facing that many rails, orchestration is the single connection that reaches them all.
Tourism adds another layer of demand. Spain drew 9.49 million international arrivals in a single month of 2024, and visitor spending rose 22% over the prior year, which floods Spanish checkouts with foreign cards that need currency conversion and tighter fraud screening. Merchants that handle those payments cleanly capture revenue that a clumsy gateway would lose at the final step.
There is also a squeeze that favors smarter platforms. European caps hold debit interchange to 0.2% and credit to 0.3%, which thins the margin on plain card processing and pushes gateways to earn their keep through analytics, fraud tools, and faster approvals instead. Small and mid-size merchants are the fastest-growing slice of the Spanish market, and they tend to want one platform that bundles billing, fraud, and payments rather than a stack they have to assemble themselves.
A Familiar Position for Betancourt López
The payments stake echoes a pattern across Alejandro Betancourt López’s portfolio. He has repeatedly favored the infrastructure beneath consumer activity over the brand customers actually see, whether that’s the permits a ride fleet runs on or the booking layer of a sport.
Payment orchestration belongs in the same family. Shoppers never see it. Merchants can’t operate without it. A position taken years before the surge now sits inside one of the faster-growing corners of Spanish fintech, with regulation and consumer habits both pushing volume toward exactly the kind of platform Easy Payment Gateway built. The early entry is the advantage, because the market is only now catching up to the problem the company set out to solve.
