Smart Router

Smart Router decides, in real time, which of your Payment Service Providers should process each transaction — and which one should rescue it if the first attempt fails. Instead of a fixed PSP or a static split you maintain by hand, a machine learning model makes that choice transaction by transaction and keeps learning from the results.

You stay in control of the boundaries: Smart Router only ever chooses from the PSPs you allow on a given routing rule, and it never touches your blocking or fraud rules — those run first, exactly as you configured them.

Business Benefits

Approval odds differ substantially from one PSP to another depending on the card scheme, the country, the issuing bank and the kind of purchase. Those differences move constantly as there's many actors in the payment chain that can fail. A static rule encodes whatever was true on the day you wrote it. Smart Router routes each transaction to the PSP with the best measured chance of approving that specific type of payment, and revises that judgement continuously.

Key advantages:

• Removes standing maintenance burden: no quarterly exercise of pulling approval rates per PSP, reviewing traffic splits and republishing rules
• Handles degradation automatically: when a PSP starts declining in performance or had a downtime, Smart Router guarantees a fast reaction and adaptation to the problem while static rules keep you in the loop with an underperformed PSP
• Measured gains: every Smart Router rule holds back a small control group, which it also learns from, so the dashboard shows the uplift produced on your own traffic

How ML Routing Works

The model starts by recognising what kind of transaction it is looking at. Transactions that behave alike are grouped into transaction profiles, built from attributes such as card scheme, issuing country and currency, among others. The exact profile definition is tuned by ProcessOut to the distribution of your traffic.

For each profile, the ML model calculates the probability that each of your eligible PSPs will sucxessfully process a transaction of that kind, based on the observed outcomes of historical transactions. It routes to the PSP with the highest probability of success, and the result — success or failure — feeds straight back into the estimates, so the next transaction benefits from what the last one revealed.

Four key properties:

• Learning happens per profile, and profiles are independent: they have their own estimates and their own ranking, so there is no single global "best PSP"
• The model deliberately keeps sending a small share of traffic to PSPs it currently ranks lower: without that, a PSP recovering from a bad week would never earn traffic back, because nothing would test it again
• Fallbacks: alongside the first-attempt decision, the ML model also learns an instant fallback retry strategy; which PSP should rescue a failed attempt
• Profiles get better as volume grows: a new setup starts with broad profiles and splits into more specific ones as each accumulates enough traffic to be judged on its own. For instance, at the beginning a profile can have only visa or mastercard as first layer and go deeper as more volume comes in.

Smart Router learns from your transactions, which makes volume the main factor determining how quickly it pays off. Each transaction profile needs enough traffic before its estimates can separate one PSP from another with confidence; until then the model is still gathering evidence rather than acting on it. The more of your traffic you route through Smart Router, the faster it converges and optimizes.

Setting It Up

Before you begin: We advise you to contact your ProcessOut representative before activating Smart Routing so we can give you recommendation of a setup that'll scale with your business.

Smart Routing is configured in the dashboard the same way you set up a PSP. Go to Dashboard › Routing tab, and on the rule you want to optimize choose Smart Routing in place of a named PSP. There is no integration work and no API change.

Configuration options:

• It can serve as the main authorization target or as a fallback behind the PSPs you want tried first, on any rule. Put it first to send the whole rule to the model, or place it after one or two fixed PSPs if you want those attempted first
• A rule takes one Smart Routing entry, and it must be the last step in the authorization chain. The dashboard will not let you add a fixed PSP after it, because from that point on Smart Routing is managing the retries itself.
• It is scoped by the same filter conditions as any other rule — currency, country, amount band, card attributes, etc.
• Your retry controls still apply: you can cap the number of attempts and list the error codes that should never be retried, per rule as usual.

Measuring the Impact

Open Monitoring › Smart router performance to review it over your desired time window.

The headline is uplift versus baseline — the conversion rate of the Smart Router group minus the control group, with a significance test, shown overall and per transaction profile. You can also see the model's current ranking of your PSPs, the share of traffic each one actually received, and a flow view from transaction profile through PSP to outcome.

Also, a few things commonly look like problems and are not:

Gateway Ranking

The ranking score is not a conversion rate: it is the model's internal probability estimate, used to order PSPs; it is not a predicted conversion rate, so it may not match the conversion rate you observe

Best PSP

A profile where one PSP has taken essentially all the traffic is usually a success rather than a stuck rule — the model found a clear winner and converged on it, which is the intended end state

PSPs tied

When two PSPs are statistically tied their shares will drift back and forth over a few hours; that is the model continuing to test them, not instability

Network Token Optimization

A network token is a scheme-issued replacement for the card number. Credentials stay current when a card is reissued, and issuers often treat tokenized traffic more favourably.

The gap depends on the issuer, the scheme, the country and the PSP connection. So Smart Router treats the credential as part of the routing decision instead of a fixed setting. For each transaction profile, it evaluates the same PSP with the token and with the card number as two separate options, and sends traffic to whichever ihas highest probability of success. As issuer behaviour changes, the split follows it on its own.

Two constraints. It only applies to PSPs that support network tokens and to cards where a token is available; anything else is sent with the card number as usual. And it is enabled per PSP configuration on a rule, so ask your ProcessOut contact to switch it on for the connections you want it on — including on a rule pinned to a single PSP, where Smart Router will still choose the credential for you.

FAQ

Does it add latency?
The decision is made in-line during routing and is negligible against the PSP authorization call itself.

What happens if a PSP goes down?
Declines and timeouts push its estimates down quickly, so traffic drains away from it and returns once it recovers. Your configured retry rules still cover the attempts already in flight.

Can I use it with network tokens and 3DS?
Yes. Your 3DS and authentication rules run as configured, and the model optimizes the best decision underneath them — including whether to present a network token.