Use case summary
Add the transaction fee value as a parameter in your routing scheme, alongside amount, currency, geography, and provider performance. Corefy evaluates routes in real time against fees and FX rates and sends each payment down the cheapest one that still clears your approval threshold. Result: processing cost drops without trading away conversion.
- Finance & CFO
- Payment Manager
Processing cost grows with the business
Fees scale with revenue. Every extra million in volume brings its own fee bill, and the same card, in the same currency, costs a different amount at each provider you are connected to.
That spread is invisible in the transaction itself. It surfaces in the settlement file, weeks later, aggregated across providers and currencies, at which point the volume has already been processed, and the cost is fixed.
Routing logic is usually written once, at launch, around whichever provider was live at the time. Provider pricing changes, FX rates move, new local acquirers get connected at better rates, and the rules keep sending traffic where they always did.
How to make cost a routing parameter
Corefy's routing engine picks a route by evaluating the transaction against a scheme of rules you write. The transaction fee value is one of the parameters those rules can use.
- 1
Write the scheme around cost
A routing scheme is a set of rules checked in sequence. Each rule tests conditions against transaction attributes, and the first rule whose conditions all match determines the strategy used. Put the cost rule where it belongs in that order.
- 2
Let the engine compare fees in real time
Corefy determines the optimal route based on the transaction fee value, with real-time fee and FX rate monitoring behind it. Currency conversion cost is part of the picture, which matters most for cross-border traffic.
- 3
Constrain the cheap route so it stays viable
Combine the fee condition with the attributes that decide whether a route can actually process the payment: amount, currency, geolocation, merchant account balance, availability, response times, and gateway performance.
- 4
Keep approval rate as the ceiling
Corefy measures route performance in real time and calculates success rates per route. Set the success rate attribute in the scheme so a cheaper route drops out of contention once its approvals fall below your threshold.
- 5
Verify the savings in analytics
Cost analytics show where volume is actually going and what it costs. Build the queries and dashboards you need in Analytics and set alerts on the metrics you own, then reorganize the flows on the evidence.
What you get
Cost stops being a quarterly finding and becomes part of the routing decision.
Lower cost per transaction
Volume moves to the provider that prices it best for that currency and geography.
Margin protected as you scale
The new volume follows the same cost logic as the original launch setup.
Cost decisions with evidence behind them
Analytics shows what each route actually costs before you move traffic onto it.
No conversion traded for cents
Success rate stays a condition, so a cheap route that declines is not a cheap route.
What cost-aware routing is worth
The Reserve Bank of Australia has studied least-cost routing, where a merchant sends a debit transaction down the cheaper of the two networks carried on the card, and found it lowers merchant debit acceptance costs by close to 20%. Its March 2026 conclusions paper also described how the industry actually implements it: most providers apply a binary rule or a single value threshold, and very few evaluate each individual transaction against the cheapest option available for it. The mechanism is proven. What varies is how finely anyone applies it.