Three M&A waves crashed through the merchant payments stack over the last 12 months: Global Payments closed its $24.25B acquisition of Worldpay on January 12, 2026; the orchestration vendor base consolidated (Worldline/PaymentIQ €160M, PayRetailers/Celeris, TokenEx/IXOPAY); and Global Payments separately swallowed takepayments in the UK. The post-Worldpay Global Payments now sits across 6 million merchant locations, $3.7 trillion in volume, and 175 countries. Counterparty concentration just rose at every layer of the merchant payments stack. For subscription companies, single-PSP architecture is no longer a sourcing decision — it’s a bet on the M&A activity of one private-sector counterparty. Orchestration absorbs the bet.