Complete guide to payment routing

Intro

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 it’s reasonable to work with multiple providers, and this is where you need to route your payments in the wiser way possible.

This guide will explain the concepts of payment routing and cascading, the reasons and best practices for routing, and how to take the pain out of it.

What is payment routing?

Payment routing is an essential payment processing feature for businesses working with multiple payment providers. It allows sending each transaction to the optimal payment gateway based on selected parameters, like card issuer (country, bank, INN/BIN), type, brand; auth mode (CVV/3DS); store; location; amount; currency, etc.

The main aim of routing is to send the transaction to the provider where it is most likely to be settled quickly and successfully.

With payment routing, a business can reach its processing goals:

• transaction costs optimisation
• acceptance rates increase
• provider downtimes protection
• payment load distribution.