Directing every transaction to the PSP most likely to approve it, at the lowest compliant cost.
A routing engine evaluates several signals together rather than sending every transaction down a fixed path.
Identifies the issuing bank and scheme, including whether the card is a local rail such as Mada.
Affects which PSPs are licensed and best positioned to process the transaction.
Card, wallet or bank-transfer methods each have different provider support.
Influences whether FX conversion is needed and which settlement path is most efficient.
Can affect fee tiers and risk thresholds applied by different PSPs.
The processing cost each connected PSP charges for that transaction type.
How well each PSP has approved similar transactions in the past.
Whether a provider is currently available and responding normally.
Whether strong customer authentication is required and which PSPs support it well.
Whether a PSP is licensed and capable of processing a local rail like Mada or KNET.
The total landed cost impact of currency conversion for a given route.
Merchant-level routing rules or constraints configured for specific markets or methods.
Every routing decision follows the same order of priorities, so cost optimization never overrides a compliance requirement.
A card BIN indicates Mada, the currency is SAR, and the merchant is in Saudi Arabia. The router only considers Saudi-licensed PSPs that support Mada — an unsupported international-only PSP is excluded regardless of price — then picks the best remaining option by approval rate, cost and availability.
A Visa or Mastercard is presented in AED while the merchant bills in USD. Here there is no single dominant local rail, so the router compares connected PSPs by total combined economics: transaction fee, FX conversion cost, and approval performance, and selects the route with the best combined outcome.
Smart routing selects the PSP for the initial attempt based on the signals above.
If that attempt is declined or times out, the retry engine classifies the failure and decides whether a safe retry — potentially on a different, still-compliant route — is appropriate.
No. Compliance requirements are applied first, then approval-rate performance, and cost is considered last among otherwise eligible routes.
Routing logic can be configured around market, payment method and provider-performance needs at the merchant level.
The routing decision happens as part of the same transaction flow and is designed to be effectively instantaneous compared with sending a transaction to a single fixed PSP.
Real-time PSP health is one of the routing signals, so an unavailable provider is deprioritized in favor of the next best eligible, available PSP.