How global intelligent payment routing can optimize your payments and drive growth

As a business researching global intelligent payment routing, you might be experiencing the following problems:

• You partner with multiple PSPs and processors and you want to set up dynamic payment routing to increase payment efficiency and decrease costs
• Your business is expanding into a new territory, and you want to add new payment gateways and payment methods in a new country without overloading your dev team
• You have limited payment expertise on your team to set up payment routing successfully and don’t have the resources to hire more team members 
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Setting up payment routes manually has traditionally been a complex task that requires having a team with the right payments expertise, as well as enough time and resources. 

Nowadays, working with a payment orchestrator and implementing intelligent payment routing allows merchants to optimize payment routing, helping to decrease costs without taking up additional engineering resources.

In this article:

• How global intelligent payment routing works 
• When does it make sense to implement intelligent payment routing?
• How Primer helps merchants optimize payments
• How Primer helped Ferryhopper with payment routing

Ready to set up intelligent payment routing? Get in touch with Primer today.

How global intelligent payment routing works

Payment routing is defining the options and paths your payments take when a given customer goes to complete a transaction.

Intelligent (also known as ‘smart’) payment routing is the process of optimizing your payment flows by routing your transactions based on various factors, including:

• Country code
• Currency
• Bank identification number (BIN)
• Card network
• And many more 
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As a global business, location is one of the most important factors affecting a transaction. For example, you might route transactions in certain regions to local payment processors with competitive fees. 

Or you might decide to route your transactions through the most reliable processors (even if that comes at a higher cost). For example, if you are based in countries with a high fraud risk, you may consider setting up conditions to prevent this based on historical trends. You might decide to automatically decline purchases under $25 USD that are made on a pre-paid card: as based on your data, these have a higher chance of being fraudulent. 

Likewise, you could reward customer loyalty. If a payment uses a certain currency and matches a certain customer ID, you could skip 3DS and immediately authorize the payment.

Intelligent payment routing empowers you to optimize your payments based on your business priorities and modify it as your needs change.

The easiest way to implement intelligent payment routing is using a unified payment infrastructure with payment orchestration capabilities.

Orchestration takes the heavy lifting out of getting all your payment options in one place so you can focus on the routing without having to deal with interoperability, multiple APIs, and manually coding payment flows. 

For example, if a customer in Germany tries to make a purchase using a local payment method, the payment orchestrator can automatically route the payment to a local German processor to ensure the highest likelihood of approval. 

Discover more about the benefits of using multiple payment processors: Why you need a multi-processor payment strategy.

When does it make sense to use a global intelligent payment routing solution?

As soon as you have more than one payment provider, intelligent payment routing can help your company:

• Keep payment costs down
• Increase customer experience
• Boost authorization rates
• Respond strategically to performance dips
• Recover revenue

While it's possible to manage payment routing manually, you'll need to invest significant resources into building and maintaining payment integrations, obtaining certifications, and managing the growing complexity as you add more providers.

Or you can use a payment infrastructure platform which will make it easier for you to implement intelligent payment routing without requiring your team to become payment experts. 

This frees up your team’s time and energy to focus on improving your product rather than worrying about payments. 

Here are a few situations where it makes sense to implement global intelligent payment routing: 

Your business is scaling quickly, and you’re considering expanding internationally 

Whether you’re planning on opening operations in a new territory or simply responding to increased domestic demand, researching new acquirers and payment methods and making sure they integrate with your systems can take up a lot of engineering time and resources. 

Intelligent payment routing via a payment orchestration platform allows you to serve different audiences with relevant local PSPs while ensuring the payment routes are optimized for the local region.

For example, if you’re in the travel industry and expanding into Europe and Asia, you might face varying success rates and transaction costs across different payment processors in each region. But instead of manually managing these, smart payment routing helps you automatically route payments through the optimal PSP for each market (based on conditions you decide, such as cost and success rates). 

You experience periods of high transaction spikes 

Many businesses face regular spikes in payment processing at certain times, such as a ticketing platform selling tickets for a global tour. Increased traffic during these events puts more pressure on their payment systems.

Ensuring they have the right payment routes, support for multiple currencies, and optimized conditions in place will help them maintain uninterrupted service. This, in turn, reduces the risk of costly fallback requests and minimizes delays or errors, leading to a smoother purchase experience for customers and higher conversion rates for merchants.

Intelligent payment routing reduces disruptions during peak times by automatically directing transactions to the most successful and cost-efficient payment processors, giving you the highest chance of payment success during busy periods. 

You want to provide faster payments for reliable customers (and decline likely fraudulent transactions) 

Without intelligent payment routing, you may encounter unnecessary declines or delays, frustrating customers and leading to cart abandonment. With smart routing, you can process payments more efficiently, particularly for trusted, high-value customers.

For example, you can route payments from loyal customers through faster authorization channels, while adding additional security measures for transactions that appear risky.

This approach not only increases the chance of payment success but also helps your business strike the right balance between fraud prevention and providing a seamless experience for legitimate customers.

You work in multiple verticals and need to tailor payment options for different parts of your business

If you are a business that operates within different verticals, you may find that different PSP providers or payment options are better suited to some of your operations than others.

For example, if part of your operations are in a more regulated or higher-risk industry like gambling, you may want to be able to route to the PSPs that accept transactions in that industry.

Or, if you want to offer certain payment options for your retail offerings but not for your experience products, intelligent payment routing can ensure you show the right options to the right customers but are able to manage those PSPs in one place.

How Primer helps merchants optimize payments

Primer is a unified payment infrastructure built by a team with experience across the payment industry. Our goal is to help all companies make the most of payments by reducing complexity and giving companies the tools they need to optimize their payment infrastructure.

We go beyond payment orchestration by offering a fully unified platform that consolidates all payment methods, providers, and services in one place.

Here are some of the ways that we can help you improve your payment infrastructure to better efficiency and costs while increasing functionality:

Your team can implement optimal payment routes without coding everything themselves, allowing engineers to focus on product development rather than payments

Managing payments is inherently complex, especially as you work with more PSPs and providers across different regions. Primer’s no-code Workflows tool simplifies this process, enabling anyone on your team to optimize payment flows without technical expertise.

For example, your marketing team could set up a workflow to automatically trigger a discount voucher whenever a payment provider fails—allowing them to respond creatively to payment issues without needing coding expertise.

When a payment is initiated, Primer can trigger a specific workflow based on the conditions and rules you set for that transaction. For example, if a payment includes a certain customer ID, Primer can automatically run a workflow to enable or disable 3DS or select a region-specific payment option.

You can also A/B test different approaches to optimize your payment flows. For instance, if a payment provider offers discounts after 1,000 transactions, you can set a workflow to use that provider until the threshold is reached, then automatically switch to another provider.

Beyond optimizing costs, well-designed workflows can also reduce risk. If one PSP experiences an outage, Primer can instantly reroute payments through other providers, minimizing downtime. This built-in redundancy ensures that your payment operations remain uninterrupted, even during unexpected provider failures.

Australian betting app Dabble used Primer when it wanted to expand to the US market. They added new payment processors without its developers having to manually code integrations with its preferred US providers, Nuvei and Checkout.com. That agility allowed Dabble to launch quickly and rank in the US app store in sports betting and daily fantasy within six weeks of the rollout. 

“Primer has been a big part of this next step in our journey,” says Cugnetto. “It allowed us to quickly integrate with the two new processors, Nuevi and Checkout.com, we needed to operate in the US. All we had to do was switch the processing currency and build a few new workflows. The reality is without Primer, we wouldn’t have launched in the US till mid-2024 at the earliest.” 

You can get a deeper understanding of your payment data and optimize the contracts with your PSPs

If you’re building your own systems and manually managing separate PSP integrations, it can be difficult to see exactly what is happening for all your payment flows. Every time you want to understand performance of a particular processor, your team will have to log into their account portal, extract the data, standardize it, and match it to your other PSP’s data.

With Primer’s Observability Dashboard, you can view the performance of all your partners from one place.

In the dashboard, you can filter to better analyze data from all your PSPs across BIN numbers, decline reasons, fallback processors and more. This makes it easier to optimize performance and detect and mitigate potential spikes in declined payments. 

For example, if you notice a spike in payment failures on a given PSP, you can quickly respond by rerouting your payment flows to avoid a processor having an outage. This not only helps you de-risk situations where one PSP goes down but also improves customer satisfaction by routing transactions to the most reliable options.

Or you can look at the long-term reliability of your different processors. For example, you can take your payment acceptance rates from the last 30 days to compare two processors.

If one processor consistently outperforms the other, you can A/B test payment routes to determine the most cost-effective and reliable option.

By leveraging detailed insights such as payment authorization rates, decline codes (and interpreting them), and processor performance across regions, you can identify which PSPs are delivering the most value and where improvements could be made. If you see that one processor is consistently underperforming, you can use this data to renegotiate better terms or permanently adjust the routing to a more efficient PSP.

You can operate globally from day one without sacrificing efficiency by easily adding new processors in one click

Primer’s no-code tool makes it easy to add new payment service providers and payment methods abroad. We have built a unified framework so you can easily integrate with different processors like Adyen or Stripe in one workspace.

This allows you to quickly respond to opportunities in new countries, or launch a new product or service with the confidence that you can route payments without internal development time. 

For example, if you want to add Worldpay as a processor, you can go to the integrations section of your Dashboard, click “+ new integrations”, search for Worldpay and follow the instructions to completion. Then, you can start adding Worldpay as an option in your Workflows. 

Primer’s tools are intuitive to use and designed to improve your payments systems without adding friction because Primer’s team has significant depth of experience in payments. We know how complex it can be to set up intelligent routing. 

By using Primer you will also be getting our team as trusted advisors. We work with customers far beyond the initial setup and we make ourselves available to act as a true extension of your team to continuously improve your payments infrastructure. You won’t need to make internal hires to get specific and contextual advice for your company’s payments. 

How Primer helped Ferryhopper with payment routing

Ferryhopper is an online travel agency that is improving how people book their ferry travel. When they started, they opted for what they felt was the simplest payment solution, directing their customers to a checkout on their Greek bank’s website.

But what seemed simple soon became cumbersome. They were frustrated with the lack of visibility into how payments were being completed and, when they started to scale, needed a more flexible option that would support international expansion without creating a mountain of work for their team.

"The deeper that we went in payments, the more we found ourselves turning into a payments company rather than focusing on creating the world's best destination to book ferry travel," said CPO and Co-founder Panagiotis Sarafis.

They chose Primer, and upgraded their payments to coordinate across 12 different countries and more than 100 ferry providers using Workflows to set up smart payment routing.

"Crafting these workflows and implementing conditioning logic has proven to be remarkably straightforward, especially with the outstanding training we received from the team," says Payments Product Lead, Konstantinos Kontos.

They also significantly increased their visibility with the help of Primer’s dashboard. This has changed how their business makes decisions, and led to better payment efficiency. 

"With Primer Observability Pro, we have more data than ever to better understand our customers and payment flows," says Kontos. "It allows us to delve into the minutiae, using metadata and crafting customized charts to decode our customers' behavior."

Thanks to using Primer, the burden of being versed in payment technology on top of their core product has been lifted.

To learn more, including how Primer improved Ferryhopper’s 3DS, read on in our case study.

Primer makes managing global intelligent payment routing simple 

Payments are regulated, complex and evolving business functions. When you start adding in multiple PSPs, different payment types and supporting different locations, the time your team spends managing all things payments can grow out of control. 

Using a unified payment infrastructure like Primer to manage global intelligent payment routing can significantly reduce the overhead your team has to take care of, while bringing significant improvements on cost, payment visibility and customer experience. 

If you are ready to see how Primer can help your company with payment routing, book a call with us today.