Gr4vy Adds PayPal Card Acquiring and Sezzle BNPL in Q3 Update

What happened

Gr4vy, the cloud payment orchestration company, has published its Q3 2026 product roundup. The headline items are PayPal card acquiring, a Sezzle buy now, pay later (BNPL) connector, and ACH bank payments through Chase Orbital. The company describes the quarter's theme as giving merchants more control over how they take payments and where they route them.21 Several smaller features sit underneath those three. Venmo is now available through PayPal credentials, Finix merchants can take Apple Pay, Adyen merchants can accept Malaysia's DuitNow, and there are new tools for multi-capture, incremental authorization and gift cards.21

No single item here will change the industry. Taken together, though, they show where online checkout is heading. Wallets, installment credit, bank payments and card acquiring are increasingly treated as interchangeable modules behind one integration. That matters for BNPL providers in particular, because their main selling point has been owning a prominent spot at checkout.

PayPal moves from wallet button to acquirer

The most strategically interesting connector is PayPal (card). It lets merchants use PayPal as their card acquirer, running alongside the PayPal wallet and Pay Later connections on the same credentials.21 Gr4vy says it handles card details, network tokens, and Apple Pay and Google Pay tokens across 26 currencies. Cards are stored in PayPal's vault for recurring, installment and card-on-file payments.21 The technical documentation says the connector runs on PayPal Complete Payments, which PayPal sells as its card acquiring product. Payments go through without sending the shopper into the PayPal wallet flow.23

A new Venmo via PayPal connector uses the same credentials to reach US buyers without bringing in a second payment provider.21 Gr4vy's argument is that a merchant consolidating on PayPal can now run wallet, card and Venmo volume through one relationship.21

The marketing copy doesn't mention the limits that the documentation lists. According to the docs, the PayPal card connector does not support direct capture, zero-amount authorization, passing through externally authenticated 3-D Secure data, incremental or decremental authorization, or multi-capture.23 The release notes do say multi-capture works on "PayPal" connections.21 Read alongside the docs, that appears to mean the wallet connector, not the new card acquiring connector.2223 Merchants thinking about moving card volume to PayPal should treat it as a capable but still-maturing acquiring option, not a drop-in replacement for an established card processor.

The bigger point is that PayPal's checkout presence is now being sold through partners as card infrastructure, not just as a button. PayPal processed $486.4 billion in total payment volume in Q2 2026, up 10% year over year, on revenue growth of 5%.11 For a company with that much volume and slower revenue growth, every card transaction it acquires through a third-party orchestrator is volume it might not otherwise have won.

Sezzle gets a seat at the orchestrated checkout

The Sezzle connector adds a BNPL option for shoppers in the US and Canada. They set up an installment plan on Sezzle's hosted page with their cart details shown.21 Merchants can save the Sezzle payment method at purchase and charge it again later as a merchant-initiated transaction, without a second redirect.21 The changelog adds decremental authorization for orders that shrink before capture, recurring payments for subscriptions and renewals, and forwarding of line items and discounts. It also notes that the underwriting data Sezzle needs never passes through Gr4vy or the merchant's checkout.22

The reusable-token feature is the important part. BNPL was built around one-off purchases. Letting a merchant charge a stored Sezzle method for renewals pushes installment credit into subscription billing, where orchestration platforms make much of their case. Gr4vy also shipped a separate change so that PayPal Pay Later and PayPal Credit can appear even when the buyer's payment method is being saved for future use.22 Both changes point the same way: installment options are being added to the stored-credential flows that card networks have long dominated.

The timing suits Sezzle. It reported Q2 2026 gross merchandise volume (GMV) of about $1.3 billion, up 37.9%, and revenue of $149.7 million, up 51.7%. Net income was $40.8 million and active consumers numbered 3.2 million.11 It also raised its 2026 adjusted net income guidance to $185 million.11 One analysis credits Sezzle's unusually high margins to a subscription model that charges consumers monthly fees, so it doesn't rely only on merchant discounts.12 Even so, Sezzle is a small player in US BNPL. One industry breakdown puts its US share at 2%, behind Afterpay, Affirm, PayPal, Klarna and Zip.16 Estimates of its size vary. One sector overview credits it with roughly $10 billion in annual GMV.17 Sezzle's own reported trailing-12-month figure is $4.6 billion as of June 30.11 The reported figure is the one to trust.

For a smaller lender, distribution through orchestration platforms is cheap access to enterprise merchants who would never run a dedicated integration project for a 2% player. That is the main reason this connector matters more to Sezzle than to Gr4vy.

Where Klarna and Affirm fit

Klarna also appears in the release. It is one of four connection types with multi-capture in limited availability, alongside Chase Orbital card, Adyen card and PayPal.21 Multi-capture lets a merchant take payment against one authorization in several steps, for example as items ship from different warehouses.21 A related changelog entry says shipment tracking attached to a capture is sent to Klarna as shipping information.22 For Klarna, that kind of fulfillment detail determines when repayment schedules start and how disputes are handled.

The wider BNPL market these connectors plug into is now profitable but growing unevenly. Klarna reported Q2 2026 revenue of $1.042 billion, up 27%, and GMV of $36.6 billion, up 18%, with a $27 million operating profit. Despite that, it cut its full-year GMV outlook to $149–151 billion, citing currency effects and weaker German volumes.11 Affirm reported its first GAAP net income, $103 million, in its fiscal third quarter on $11.6 billion of GMV, up 35%.12 It then closed its fiscal year with GMV of $50.2 billion, up 37%.15

The leaders are both trying to depend less on merchant checkout integrations. Affirm Card GMV rose 146% to $2.1 billion in the March quarter. Klarna passed a million debit card signups in eleven weeks.12 Gr4vy's release shows the merchant side of the same pressure. If a merchant can add or swap BNPL providers through configuration, a spot at checkout becomes easier to win and easier to lose. That helps challengers like Sezzle. It also explains why Affirm and Klarna are pushing cards that consumers carry from store to store.

The economics behind adding more ways to pay

The usual case for BNPL at checkout is that higher merchant fees are paid back in conversion and basket size. Published fee schedules put Sezzle at about 6% plus $0.30. Klarna ranges from 3.29% to 5.99% plus $0.30.19 The claimed benefits vary widely. Some industry compilations cite conversion gains of 20% to 30%, and Klarna's own figures reach 35%. Stripe's testing across more than 150,000 checkout sessions found revenue gains of up to 14%.16 The provider-reported numbers are best treated as the top of the range, with Stripe's figure closer to what most merchants should plan for.

That gap is why orchestration vendors argue that merchants should be able to test methods instead of committing to them. One merchant guide recommends showing no more than two BNPL options to keep checkout fast and simple.14 That advice only works if switching providers is easy, which is exactly what Gr4vy is selling.

ACH and the push away from cards

The Chase Orbital ACH connector lets existing Orbital merchants accept bank payments in USD and CAD with their current credentials. Refunds go back as ACH credits, and stored accounts can be used for recurring debits.21 It builds on earlier ACH work with Nuvei, Adyen and BlueSnap, and on a March 2026 partnership with Plaid. That deal was pitched as a cheaper alternative to card payments, with industry estimates putting the account-to-account opportunity at around $4 trillion by 2030.2228 Within the same quarter, Gr4vy also signed acquiring partnerships with Unlimit and Airwallex.310

The takeaway

Gr4vy's own conclusion is that each new connection makes the orchestration layer stronger by letting merchants change providers without rebuilding their integration.21 That is self-serving, but on the evidence it is largely right. The Q3 release shows BNPL, wallets, bank payments and card acquiring being repackaged as routable options. The winners are likely to be providers like PayPal, which can sell acquiring through partners, and smaller lenders like Sezzle, which get distribution they couldn't build alone. Klarna and Affirm keep their scale. But each orchestrator that makes BNPL easier to swap adds to the case for the card strategies both are now pursuing.