Every declined payment is a customer who wanted to buy and could not. Some declines are correct: the card is stolen or the account is empty. Many are not. They happen because the acquirer, the issuer or the network made a cautious call on a perfectly good transaction.
Why one acquirer is not enough
Acquirers perform differently by card brand, issuing country, currency and vertical. One that approves domestic cards well may struggle with cross-border traffic. If all your volume goes through one connection, you inherit all of its weak spots.
What smart routing does
Smart orchestration looks at each transaction before it is sent and picks the route most likely to succeed. It weighs things like:
- the card’s issuing country and brand,
- the currency and amount,
- recent approval rates on each route,
- the cost of each route.
If a payment is declined for a soft reason, it can be retried on another route automatically, without asking the customer to enter their details again.
More than approvals
Routing also gives you resilience. If one provider has an outage, traffic moves elsewhere and your checkout stays up. And because every route reports into one dashboard, you can see what is happening across all of them.
Learn more about Smart Orchestration or tell us about your setup.