March 3, 2024
6 min
Routing is one of the crucial elements of payment processing. Your conversion and approval rates directly depend on how you route your transactions. If you work with a single payment service provider, there's not much you can do — every glitch or downtime of your provider will result in your losses. That's why working with multiple providers is reasonable, and this is where you need to route your payments in the best way possible.
In this article, Corefy cuts a long story short and offers a straightforward guide to static payment routing vs dynamic payment routing. Let's find out how static routing and dynamic routing schemes work.
What is payment routing?
This way, a business can reach its processing goal: transaction cost optimisation, acceptance rates increase, provider downtime protection, or payment load distribution.
A business can route its transactions in a desirable way by creating static routing schemes. However, modern smart routing solutions enable greater efficiency by automatically and dynamically routing your transactions to the best-suited provider. Now, let's compare static payment routing vs dynamic payment routing in greater detail.
What is static payment routing?
Think of yourself as a logistics operator. Your freight is your transactions. If you pick a map, draw a route for your cargo to be delivered, and follow it strictly no matter what, that will be static routing. A tree topples onto your road, and you can't make the delivery anymore.
Static payment routing implies sending transactions to payment providers through manually configured routes. These routes are fixed and unresponsive to any occurrences. With static routing, you can't process transactions and lose sales if your pre-defined route becomes unavailable. That's why the main drawback is that static routing uses a default static route.
What is dynamic payment routing?
Let's return to our logistics fantasy that helped us understand static routing. Imagine you now have an advanced GPS navigation system that picks the optimal route to deliver your freight, considering traffic, weather, and road conditions. Once the system detects a car accident on your way, it will choose an alternative route to complete freight delivery.
This is how dynamic routing works. Unlike static routing, dynamic routing allows for adapting to changes and selecting the most efficient way to ensure each transaction's successful completion.
Setting up various dynamic routing rules ensures the continuity of your operations, leading to an increase in approval ratios. For instance, our intelligent routing engine can select the best route based on multiple parameters, such as card issuer/type/brand, country, currency, amount, date & time, etc.
Static routing vs dynamic routing: what’s the difference?
The table below summarises the main characteristics of static routing vs dynamic routing and gives a clear vision of the difference between static and dynamic payment routing.
| STATIC ROUTING | DYNAMIC ROUTING |
|---|---|
| Routing rules are strict and fixed | Various rules cascade in real time |
| The provider is pre-defined | Transactions go to the best available provider |
| Totally depends on the provider's stability | Eliminates the effect of the provider's downtimes on your business |
| Acceptable for small businesses | A must for medium and large businesses |
Static routing is often considered an outdated option that is unsuitable for modern realities. Nevertheless, it may be helpful when you need to establish strict rules and use only selected merchant accounts to process particular transactions. That's why static routing is also called rule-based. Still, this option is hardly scalable. As your business grows, the complexity of the rules will also increase. Moreover, you'll have to maintain and update them manually.
With dynamic routing, every transaction is automatically routed to the provider that offers the highest probability of success. Alongside smart processing tools like cascading and failover management, dynamic routing helps eliminate the effect of any issues on the providers' side on your business. With dynamic routing, your customers enjoy a seamless and frictionless experience while your business benefits from operational continuity and increased conversion.
How can Corefy's smart routing capabilities help optimise your operations?
Corefy's smart routing engine maximises payment performance and enables the highest success rates by optimising all incoming and outgoing transactions in real time.
With this tool on board, you can quickly implement and alter various flow strategies, such as:
- Optimisation by fees. Corefy can dynamically determine the optimal route based on a transaction fee value. The real-time monitoring of fees and currency conversion rates helps to optimise all transactions and ensure the least-cost payment routing. Our cost analytics will help you reorganise the flows most optimally.
- Optimisation by conversions. Our platform measures all routing paths' performance in real time to calculate success rates for every route while collecting statistics and providing analytics. Follow the conversion optimisation strategy by setting the success rate attribute in the routing scheme.
- Optimisation by balances. Automatically allocate a payment or payout request to a single account with a sufficient balance. We provide real-time monitoring and tracking of merchant account balances through a single Dashboard to keep you constantly updated on your funds.
- Optimisation by weightings. Distribute turnover and risks among multiple merchant accounts. Our system supports the automatic allocation of incoming and outgoing transactions to a single account by weighting criteria. It makes your business more flexible in operations.
- Optimisation by turnover volumes. Based on the turnover statistics collected for all of your merchant accounts, you can opt for routing by turnover volumes. Set up turnover limits for any merchant accounts you have and automatically distribute cash among them considering that parameter.
- Combined optimisation strategies. You are free to modify and combine the above-listed strategies and use various strategies with different merchant accounts. It creates almost endless routing possibilities and serves your business needs.
.png)
