How does smart routing work?
Each payment first passes an eligibility filter that removes providers which cannot take it, for example because of country, currency, method or amount limits. The remaining providers are ranked by the merchant’s rules: a fixed priority, a percentage split, recent approval rate for that segment, cost, or a combination. The top provider gets the payment and the others form the cascade order if it is declined.
Why does smart routing matter for approval rate?
Providers perform differently on different traffic. As an illustrative example with 10,000 payments, 60% from domestic cards and 40% from foreign cards: PSP A approves 80% of domestic and 55% of foreign cards, PSP B approves 68% of domestic and 74% of foreign. Sending everything to A gives 7,000 approvals and everything to B gives 7,040. Routing domestic cards to A and foreign cards to B gives 4,800 plus 2,960, or 7,760 approvals, a 77.6% rate, without changing either provider.
What are the risks of smart routing?
Rules based on small samples can chase noise, and routing that changes too often makes performance hard to read. Optimising only for approval can raise cost, and optimising only for cost can lower approval. Good setups use minimum sample sizes, keep a small share of traffic on alternative routes to keep measuring them, and log every decision so operations and finance teams can see why a payment went where it did.
Where does Omno use it?
Omno’s routing rules are set by the merchant, not by a model. They choose the provider by card BIN, country, currency, amount, browser information or customer segment, within the set allowed by PSP eligibility rules. Rules can split traffic by share, apply provider limits based on declines and successes, and use sticky or reverse-sticky routing. If a provider is unavailable or rejects the request, the payment moves to the next provider in the rule until one accepts, and the routing-decision log records the rule that matched for every transaction.