Author
Caroline Banton
What if you only needed one?
If you are a merchant who uses Elavon for your payment processing, you’ll be familiar with its range of payment channels — in-person, contactless, online, and mobile. What you might not be familiar with is Elavon’s latest offering: the EPG super gateway. Just when you were getting to grips with multiple payment gateways, Elavon may have just made things a whole lot simpler.
Launched in 2024 in the United States and set to launch later this year in Canada, the EPG super gateway promises to “end the chaos” of multi-gateway payment channels with a single consolidated payment platform.
Here’s a look at what led up to this latest innovation and what it means for merchants who use Elavon.
Why Payment Gateways Are Consolidating
Merchants operate across different industries, sell different products, and use multiple channels. This variation calls for payment solutions that work for physical stores, mobile apps, subscriptions, marketplaces, and social platforms. Historically, each distribution channel required a different payment integration, which in turn led to different reporting environments and compliance workflows.
Elavon’s EPG super gateway solves the complexities posed by multiple gateways by consolidating them into a single gateway. Also, reports that used to be on separate dashboards are now unified in one place, and PCI (payment card industry) compliance is centralized.
To give a practical example: a retailer who wants to add subscription billing would previously have needed an additional gateway integration and reporting environment. Under the EPG gateway architecture, adding this functionality is a simple enhancement, not a system rebuild.
The super gateway also operates across industries to simplify commerce and expand business opportunities. For example, an automotive dealer can integrate financing options and recurring service payments to improve their customer service. A travel company can integrate cross-border reservations and payments. This streamlining also reduces the friction that multiple gateways can cause.
“Friction” Costs Merchants Don’t Think About
Multiple gateways pose challenges for merchants, which translate into costs. It is true that merchants who use multiple payment gateways can gain wider regional coverage and better routing flexibility, but those benefits also introduce friction. The operational, financial, technical, and organizational burden of maintaining multiple gateways reduces efficiency over time.
Operational and Maintenance Complexity
Each gateway a merchant uses might require a separate API, separate tokenization, different fraud tools, and a range of reporting options. Merchants often must test every upgrade, duplicate engineering, and manage more vendor relationships. These requirements also have knock-on effects.
Siloed Data
Transactions that run through several gateways create siloed data, complicating analytics. For example, data on refunds, failed payments, gateway fees, interchange costs, and chargebacks must be gathered from different sources. This is less efficient and increases the likelihood of less accurate results.
Inconsistent Customer Experience
Different gateways often have different checkout flows. They can be slower, faster, or require additional verification steps. All of these inconsistencies can increase customer frustration, leading to lower conversion rates and higher cart abandonment.
Operational Overheads
Multiple gateways mean multiple vendors and additional costs. Each of these vendors will conduct their own compliance reviews, service-level agreement (SLA) monitoring, and other administrative tasks. Your internal teams might also need training for each gateway provider.
Indirect Costs
Even if multiple gateways reduce direct processing costs through routing optimization, merchants may incur indirect costs such as duplicated software licensing, additional middleware, consulting expenses, integration partners, and larger payment operations teams.
Fraud and Risk Management Gaps
Fraud and risk management will be fragmented with multiple gateways, which can increase the risks of fraudulent activity. A single fraud management strategy across a single gateway can better support behavioral analytics, payment velocity, dispute tracking, and device fingerprinting.
Overall, fraud detection may become less effective unless merchants implement an overarching orchestration or fraud platform.
Stalled Innovation
With multiple platforms, new integrations become cumbersome because introducing additional services is becoming a much more time-consuming and costly endeavor. Examples of such add-ons are Buy now, pay later schemes, new wallets, tokenized recurring billing, and real-time payments.
Instead of deploying these features once, merchants often must coordinate them across several systems.
EPG’s value proposition, then, is to make payments less about sheer volume and more about reducing barriers to pave the way for smooth and efficient payment processes. And that goes for both the merchant and the customer. Elavon was well-prepared to make the move to its new EPG super gateway. Its recent acquisitions were strategic and focused on vertical specialization with an eye to consolidation.
Were Elavon’s Acquisitions About Scale or Specialization?
Elavon’s most recent acquisitions were calculated. The acquisition of CenPOS in 2019 and Salucro in 2024 specifically enhanced embedded payment channels in various sectors.1 2
CenPOS brought payment expertise in the automotive and travel industries while Salucro expanded Elavon’s healthcare payments and patient-billing workflows. Through these mergers, Elavon positioned itself for greater customer reach and a unified cross-sectoral payment platform.
At the same time, partnerships with Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic, and Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) have resulted in a competitive advantage in the payments ecosystem across industries and sectors.3 4 5
Five Questions Merchants Should Ask Themselves Before Migrating to the EPG Super Gateway
At Cartis, we understand that merchants might hesitate to migrate to the new super gateway, and they would be wise to do their due diligence before doing so. Key things to know are how complex integration with your existing payment infrastructure will be and how a single gateway might affect your providers.
Our experts can provide the answers to these questions and more. Here are some of the more common questions merchants ask.
1. Will my historical reporting migrate?
Historical data is vital for most merchants, enabling them to make business decisions based on trends. Each migration will be different and should be treated on a case-by-case basis. Historical reporting typically migrates to some extent, though the depth of that migration may vary.
Transaction history, settlement records, and reporting data are usually preserved during gateway consolidations, while custom fields, legacy report structures, or highly customized exports may not transfer one-for-one. Businesses with extensive reporting workflows may need specialized mapping or adjustments.
2. Will my APIs change?
The newer Elavon gateway ecosystem is heavily API-driven and REST-based, which implies that an API interface will eventually be required. That said, a unified gateway architecture can often maintain backward compatibility during transition periods, easing the changeover.
That means that existing integrations can continue working initially, but merchants should expect new endpoints, data structures, authentication methods, or expanded functionality over time.
3. Will consolidating to a single gateway make me dependent on a single provider?
You won’t necessarily be dependent on one provider if you opt for Elavon’s super gateway. The unified gateway can act as a layer over multiple payment processors, acquirers, or payment methods, so you might still retain access to multiple card networks and payment methods.
That said, your integrations, routing logic, reporting, fraud tools, tokenization, and APIs are centralized within Elavon’s gateway, so there may be more complications later. For example, in a single payment ecosystem, third-party gateway features could become harder to access. Also, there could be more friction because more business processes are tied to one platform.
4. How will my costs be affected?
Again, this question is difficult to answer because every case is different. However, here’s an overview of potential cost changes resulting from adopting Elavon’s new EPG.
Potential cost reductions:
- Fewer integrations to maintain
- Reduced overhead and administrative costs
- Simpler IT support
- Bundled services vs. third-party tools
Potential cost increases:
- Premium features might potentially move to paid tiers
- Initial migration or implementation costs
- Ongoing development work to update integrations
- Switching costs for deeper platform dependence
The immediate impact may depend on how aggressively you adopt the new EPG services.
5. How long will my payments be disrupted?
The more complex your legacy architecture, the longer you might experience some migration disruption. It could be hours, days, or weeks. Heavily customized architecture with multiple APIs, tokenization, recurring billing, subscriptions, ERP integrations, and custom reporting will take longer because there could be downstream effects across billing, reporting, and customer workflows.
What Elavon’s EPG Says About the Future of Payments
Elavon’s EPG represents a huge step forward in the development of cloud-based “platforms” for payment gateways. This new unified platform enables greater control over embedded payments, fraud prevention, omnichannel commerce, and customer experiences across sectors.
The success of the super gateway is also pointing towards a new commerce world where standalone gateways may well disappear.
If your business needs a wide-reaching payments architecture that’s more straightforward and streamlined, contact a Cartis expert. We’ll show you how to help your business adapt so that you aren’t left behind in the payments ecosystem.
Let’s review your current payment architecture and identify opportunities to simplify, reduce complexity, and support future growth.
References
- Commercial Payments International, n.d. “Elavon Acquires CenPOS.” Economist Enterprise. https://www.commercialpaymentsinternational.com/news/elavon-acquires-cenpos Accessed June 1, 2026.
- Joey Pizzolato, August 22, 2024. “U.S. Bank acquires health care payments platform.” American Banker. https://www.americanbanker.com/payments/news/u-s-bank-acquires-health-care-payments-platform. Accessed June 1, 2026.
- Byron E. Small, June 21, 2024. “Atlanta fintech company expands payments to Delta flights.” https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2024/06/21/elavon-delta-air-lines-payments-in-flight.html. Accessed June 1, 2026.
- Elavon. “Virgin Atlantic flies high with airlines expert.” https://www.elavon.com/resources/insights/virgin-atlantic.html Accessed June 1, 2026.
- Businesswire, June 6, 2024. “Elavon to Enable Contactless Payments for SEPTA Commuters.” https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240606013856/en/Elavon-to-Enable-Contactless-Payments-for-SEPTA-Commuters Accessed June 1, 2026.