CellPoint has launched Zenith, an AI decisioning layer built to sit above payment orchestration rather than compete inside it, and has lined up $34 million from Toscafund to build it. The detail that matters for anyone selling orchestration is in the product definition: CellPoint describes Zenith as “an AI decisioning layer that sits above any payment orchestrator – CellPoint’s own or a third party’s”. A vendor whose website footer still reads “Leading Payment Orchestration” is telling airlines and hotels they do not need to buy its router to buy its intelligence.
That is a contrarian move for an orchestration specialist, and it follows the logic this site set out in July, when we argued that payment orchestration is consolidating as merchant PSP estates shrink. If routing is becoming a feature that Stripe, Adyen and Checkout.com bundle into their own stacks, the margin moves to whoever decides what the routing should do. Zenith is CellPoint’s bet that the decision layer can be sold separately from the pipes.
What CellPoint announced
The announcement, dated September 22, 2026 in London, bundles three things. First, a US$34 million investment from Toscafund, managed by its private equity affiliate Penta Capital. Second, a new leadership team: Penta Capital has appointed Kevin Murphy as Group CEO and Michael Kelly as Chairman. Third, Zenith itself, pitched at airline and hospitality payments. The Financial IT report of the deal carries the same terms.
According to the release, Zenith turns payment data “into automated commercial decisions”, and airlines and hotels “can adopt Zenith without replacing their existing payment stack.” The money also funds 50 new roles in product, data, AI, sales and partnerships across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Patrick Uckermark moves up to Chief Product and Technology Officer, leading the AI and data roadmap. He joined CellPoint Digital as Chief Technology Officer in September 2025 after a tenure at Sabre, according to the company’s appointment notice.
“Payments are one of the largest controllable cost and revenue lines in an airline or hotel P&L, and one of the least well managed,” said Kevin Murphy, Group CEO at CellPoint. “Our job is to change that. Zenith uses AI to raise approval rates, cut cost of payments, recover lost revenue and give CFOs a live view of what their payment stack is actually doing.”
One year from orchestration to decisioning
Exactly one year earlier, on September 22, 2025, CellPoint Digital launched One Source Orchestration (OSO), billed as a payment orchestration platform for airline Offer-Order-Settle-Deliver retailing. That release claimed capacity of 10,000 transactions per second and AI-driven routing that improves approval rates “by up to 25%”. Then-CEO Kristian Gjerding framed orchestration as the product. The 2026 release does not mention him, and it drops “Digital” from the company name.
Twelve months later, the AI inside the router has been lifted out and made orchestrator-agnostic: a tacit admission that the router alone does not command pricing power.
How rivals are positioned
Independent orchestrators such as BR-DGE, Gr4vy, Spreedly and Primer still sell neutrality against processor-owned routing. Yuno raised a $45 million Series B in August and differentiated by adding stablecoin rails, a breadth play. Adyen has moved the other way, launching Agentic for AI-driven checkout inside its own acquiring stack. CellPoint is taking a third route: a vertical depth play that treats whichever orchestrator a merchant runs as a data source.
We found no public response to Zenith from rival orchestrators by September 23. The real test will be whether third-party orchestrators open their transaction data to a layer that could, over time, recommend a merchant moves volume away from them.
Why airlines and hotels
Travel payments involve split tenders, points-plus-cash bookings, multi-currency ancillaries and several acquirers per market, which is why single-processor consolidation works poorly there. CellPoint’s existing base reflects that complexity: its Radisson Hotel Group deployment spans more than 1,580 hotels in over 100 countries, with intelligent routing across multiple acquirers.
Steven Scott, Managing Partner at Penta Capital, said Zenith is “a genuinely differentiated position in a category that matters.” The private equity structure matters too. Like Nuvei’s decision to install a new COO, CFO and CPTO, a leadership reset of this kind usually comes with a narrower mandate and a clock. The release describes the mandate as “focus the company, invest in AI, and deliver measurable financial impact”.
What happens next
Our expectation is that the decisioning layer becomes the contested ground in payment orchestration over the next 12 to 18 months, with independents rebranding routing engines as AI decision products. The causal chain is straightforward: routing is being bundled by processors, which compresses orchestration fees, which pushes vendors toward analytics that can be priced against recovered revenue instead of transaction volume. For CellPoint, the proof will be customer names on Zenith running a third-party orchestrator underneath. Until one of those is announced, “sits above any payment orchestrator” remains a design claim, not a market position.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
