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Smart payment strategy
Balancing system

Smart Payment Routing System

Every acquirer approves some cards, countries and amounts better than others, and each has its own volume limits. Smart payment routing from Payneteasy puts that to work: it sends every transaction to the best-fit acquirer under the rules and balancing you set and, if that acquirer declines, passes it to the next one in your cascading chain. Your team configures it per project in the Routing & Balancing settings of the payment orchestration platform, which runs on the white-label payment gateway.

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Smart payment routing rules

Send each segment of your traffic to the acquirer that approves it more often or offers you better terms for it. Combine several criteria in one strategy:

Card: BIN range, card type, issuer, card country
Transaction: amount, transaction type, recurring or non-recurring, time and day of week
Customer: IP country and range, billing country, returning-customer status
Third-party checks: responses from services such as MaxMind, including VPN, proxy and Tor detection

Rules can use parameters from the payment request as well as data calculated during processing. See all options in flexible payment routing.

Routing rules: payment request, calculated and third-party parameters

Cascading payments on declines

A declined payment does not have to be a lost sale. If an acquirer declines a transaction, it moves to the next acquirer in the chain, in priority order, until one approves it or the chain ends. The customer does not have to retry the payment.

You decide which declines cascade:

any decline (default)
only the decline codes you select
any decline except the codes you select

You can also pause an acquirer for a specific card for a set time after selected error codes, so the card is not sent straight back to an acquirer that has just declined it. For a step-by-step explanation, read our guide to payment cascade routing.

Balancing traffic between acquirers

When several acquirers can process the same transaction, balancing splits traffic between them, so you do not depend on a single acquirer and can deliver the volumes you agreed with each:

By coefficient: share traffic by transaction count or by transaction amount
Equally: spread traffic evenly across acquirers
By customer history: start the chain with the acquirer that last approved this customer, or reorder it by each acquirer's last result for them

You set how many approved transactions make a customer “returning”. Processing statistics build up as you go and show which acquirer works best for each client and traffic type, so you can adjust the split based on data.

Balancing: share of traffic sent to each acquirer

Limits and filters for acquirers

Sending an acquirer more than it agreed to take puts the relationship at risk. Processing limits keep each acquirer within its agreed volumes:

hard, soft and cumulative limits
set by merchant, endpoint, gate, processor or company, and by card type
counted by amount or by number of transactions
e-mail and Telegram warnings when a limit reaches 50%, 75%, 95% or 100% — you choose which — with the option to suspend traffic once it is reached

Acquirer restrictions by card type and country keep traffic away from an acquirer that does not accept it. See limits and filters for acquirers.

Build routing around your own business logic and risk policy

Tell us your acquirers and traffic mix, and we will map a routing strategy to them.

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Frequently asked questions

What is smart payment routing?

Smart payment routing is the automated choice of an acquirer for each transaction, based on the rules you define and the processing statistics the system accumulates. In Payneteasy it combines routing rules, cascading, balancing and processing limits, configured per project. New to the topic? Start with the payment routing glossary entry.

How does smart routing help approval rates?

Acquirers approve different card types, issuers and countries at different rates. Routing sends each segment to the acquirer that approves it more often, and cascading gives a declined transaction another chance with the next acquirer in the chain. The effect depends on your traffic and acquirer mix, so the best starting point is your current decline data.

How does cascading work?

A declined transaction moves to the next acquirer in the chain until one approves it or the chain ends. By default every decline cascades; you can limit cascading to selected decline codes or exclude them, and skip a gate for a specific card for a set time after selected errors.

Can I configure routing per merchant?

Yes. Routing and balancing are configured at project level, so each merchant project can have its own rules, acquirer priorities, cascading chain and limits.

Which acquirers and PSPs can I route across?

Any acquirer or PSP connected to your gateway. If a provider you work with is not yet connected, Payment Channels give access to it from the Payneteasy integrations catalog within 1‒2 weeks.