Use case summary
Route each transaction by currency and card country to a provider that acquires locally and settles in that currency. Where conversion is unavoidable, your own FX scheme sets the rate, and route fees show what each path costs. Result: fewer payments carry conversion markups or cross-border fees, and finance can see where the remaining FX cost sits.
- Finance & CFO
- Payment Manager
Why FX cost is hard to see and harder to cut
FX cost rarely appears as one line. It includes the currency conversion fee a provider adds when converting into the currency you are paid in. It also includes the cross-border fees charged when the card and the acquirer, the bank processing the payment, are in different countries.
Cross-border fees also change with regulation and scheme decisions. After Brexit, interchange, the fee the card's issuing bank receives on each payment, rose from 0.2% to 1.15% on UK–EEA online consumer debit payments, and it took until January 2026 for a UK court to confirm that the regulator can cap it.
With one provider per region, this is fixed. Every transaction takes the same path, so conversion and cross-border treatment depend on where your acquirer sits, whatever currency the customer paid in.
How to route around conversion and cross-border fees
Whether a payment is converted and whether it counts as cross-border depends largely on which provider processes it. Routing by currency lets you make that choice for each transaction and reduce cross-border fees wherever a local route exists.
- 1
Connect providers that acquire and settle locally
For each major currency you accept, connect a provider that acquires locally, meaning it processes payments in the customer's own country, and settles in that currency. The connectors directory can be filtered by currency and flow type.
- 2
Route by currency and card country
Routing rules send each transaction to the matching provider using currency, amount, customer country, and BIN, the first digits of a card number that identify the issuing bank and its country. A euro card payment goes to the provider that settles in euros.
- 3
Compare what each route costs
Route fees hold the processing cost you set for each provider path, and analytics includes them, so you can estimate the margin on a transaction after all fees are applied.
- 4
Convert on your own rates when you have to
When a payment has to be converted, an FX scheme applies the rate source, spread (your margin over the source rate), and fee you set per currency pair, as described in multi-currency settlement.
- 5
Check what providers actually charged
Route fee auto-correction recalculates fees per route during reconciliation, the check of your records against provider statements, so you can compare them with the amounts each provider reported.
What you get
Fewer payments are converted; the ones that are use your rates, and finance can see the FX cost of each route.
Lower cost on cross-border traffic
Payments routed to a local acquirer in the customer's currency avoid the conversion markup and, in most cases, the cross-border fees that come with foreign acquiring.
FX cost visible per route
Route fees and routing costs in analytics show what each path costs, so finance can see which markets and providers carry most of the FX expense.
Your rates when conversion happens
Conversions that remain use your own rate source, spread, and fee per currency pair, applied the same way on every route.
Less exposure to fee changes you don't control
When a scheme raises a cross-border fee, traffic already acquired locally is outside its scope, and you can shift more volume to local routes as fee levels change.
2026 scheme fee changes were estimated to cost merchants up to $200 million
CMSPI estimated that card scheme fee updates taking effect in April 2026 would cost merchants in Europe and Australia up to $200 million. Among them was a Mastercard cross-border fee in Australia rising from 0.75% to 1.15%. Fees of this kind apply when the card and the acquirer are in different countries. A transaction acquired locally, in the customer's own market and currency, falls outside this, which is why routing by currency affects more than the exchange rate.