Routing rules
Complex transaction pathways depend on explicit conditions, priorities and custom parameters. Payment routing rules give operations administrators manual control through Cardflo’s Boolean rules engine, weighted logic and pre-deployment condition testing.
- Category
- Routing
- Capabilities
- 10
- Available on
- All plans
Cardflo offers extensive rule configuration to dictate how transactions are processed and directed through various payment service providers and acquirers. Establishing explicit conditions ensures each payment follows a predetermined path, aligning with your operational objectives and risk appetite.
These configurable rules provide precise control over the flow of funds, allowing businesses to adapt dynamically to market changes, optimise processing costs, and improve transaction success rates without manual intervention.
Our customisable routing rules allow for precise control over transaction flows, prioritising costs and enabling cascading retries across all MIDs. These rules are vital for managing your payments efficiently within our extensive acquirer partner network.
Routing rules overview
Developing effective routing rules requires a clear understanding of the transactional lifecycle and the precise conditions that trigger specific processing paths.
This capability allows payments teams to define detailed logic, such as directing domestic Visa transactions below a certain value to a specific acquirer, while international MasterCard payments over a different threshold might be routed elsewhere for better authorisation rates or lower fees.
The system supports nested conditions, Boolean operators, and a range of data points including BIN, currency, card type, transaction amount, and merchant category code. Rule changes are managed through a version control system, allowing modifications to be staged, reviewed, and deployed without disrupting live operations, maintaining an auditable trail for compliance and performance analysis.
Effective change management is crucial for routing rules; common pitfalls include conflicting conditions, overly broad rules that capture unintended transactions, or rules that create illogical processing loops. Testing in a sandbox environment before deployment helps identify and resolve these issues, ensuring that new or modified rules perform as expected under various simulated real-world conditions.
How routing rules works
Define rule conditions
Start by identifying the specific criteria that will trigger a routing decision. These conditions could include the card scheme (e.g., Visa, MasterCard), the BIN range, the transaction currency (e.g., GBP, EUR), or the amount. Set precise thresholds and operators (e.g., greater than, equals, not equal to) for each parameter to isolate relevant transactions effectively.
Set prioritisation and fallbacks
Assign a priority level to each rule, determining its evaluation order. Higher priority rules are checked first. Configure fallback options for scenarios where a primary route fails or does not meet performance expectations. This ensures transactions are continuously processed, even if an initial path is unavailable or authorisation is declined. Explicit fallbacks maintain transaction continuity.
Test in a sandbox environment
Before deploying any new or modified routing rule to production, rigorously test its behaviour in a sandbox. Simulate various transaction profiles that match your defined conditions and fallbacks. Verify that transactions are directed to the intended acquirers and that any failure scenarios correctly trigger the specified fallback routes. This validation prevents unexpected behaviour in live operations.
Deploy and monitor
Once tested, deploy the rule to your live environment. Continuously monitor its performance using Cardflo's analytics tools, paying close attention to authorisation rates, processing times, and cost implications for transactions handled by the new rule. Adjustments can be made iteratively, following the same testing and deployment cycle, to refine optimisation.
Why routing rules matters
Preventing common misconfigurations
Incorrectly configured routing rules can lead to increased processing costs, lower authorisation rates, or even missed transactions. Common errors include overlapping conditions that create ambiguity, rules with excessively low priority that are never reached, or loops that prematurely re-route transactions. Clear definitions and specific thresholds minimise these risks. Proper testing in a sandboxed environment will help to identify and rectify these issues before they affect live payment flows, preserving operational efficiency.
Ensuring business ownership and control
Payments teams or financial operations departments directly manage routing rules, providing granular control over payment flows without extensive technical development. This decentralises management from core engineering, allowing business experts to respond rapidly to changing market conditions, scheme updates, or cost optimisation opportunities. Direct configuration empowers merchants to align payments strategies with commercial objectives, ensuring that transactions always follow the most advantageous path available.
Routing rules use cases
Threshold and currency branching
Payment operations administrators define Boolean conditions combining transaction amount, presentment currency and merchant-defined order attributes, but overlapping thresholds can send a payment down the wrong pathway. Cardflo provides a rules engine for nested IF/THEN logic, explicit rule priority and controlled testing against representative transaction inputs before publication.
MID selection by sales channel
Retail groups processing website, app and in-store transactions may need each channel and legal entity mapped to the correct MID for settlement and reconciliation. Cardflo lets administrators combine channel, entity and payment method parameters, weight competing rules by priority and validate the resulting acquirer partner pathway before activation.
Restricted product category routing
Merchants selling regulated and unrestricted inventory in one checkout must identify orders containing age-restricted or licence-dependent product categories before routing them to an eligible MID. Cardflo supports custom product metadata, nested AND/OR conditions and test cases that confirm restricted baskets reach the intended acquirer partner configuration.
Wallet token pathway rules
Payment teams accepting Apple Pay, Google Pay and network-tokenised cards may require different gateway endpoints according to wallet type, token assurance data or device channel. Cardflo enables administrators to define method-specific parameters, order mutually exclusive rules and test wallet payload conditions without altering the merchant’s wider card acceptance logic.
Routing rules by the numbers
This range reflects typical improvements seen by merchants. These occur when moving from a single-acquirer setup to a multi-routed environment that prioritises local processing.
These are typical savings achieved by minimising inter-regional scheme fees and optimising for lower-cost acquirers via intelligent routing logic.
This is industry-standard availability for businesses with multi-gateway failover strategies. These strategies prevent downtime during individual processor outages.
Methodology: these figures are illustrative ranges drawn from published industry data and observed merchant cohorts, not guarantees. Actual results depend on your risk profile, card mix, geography and acquiring setup, and are confirmed only in your own pricing and approval terms.
Related terms
Talk to our team about a live rollout across our acquirer partners' rails.
What you get with Routing rules
- Define transaction routing based on specific card schemes, issuing country, and transaction values.
- Implement rules that consider BIN ranges, currency codes, and merchant category codes.
- Prioritise transaction paths for optimal cost efficiency or improved authorisation rates.
- Establish conditions to direct payments to specific acquirers or alternative payment methods.
- Utilise Boolean logic (AND/OR) to construct sophisticated multi-parameter routing rules.
- Manage rule changes through a versioning system, allowing rollbacks if necessary.
- Isolate rule modifications within a sandbox environment for thorough validation and testing.
- Configure fallback rules for when primary paths are unavailable or decline the transaction.
- Maintain an auditable log of all rule creations, modifications, and deployments.
- Mitigate processing errors by carefully defining rule precedence and avoiding overlaps.
A short scoping call, then a written plan for your MIDs.
Questions about Routing rules
How does dynamic routing impact the speed of the checkout process?
Professional routing engines are designed to operate with minimal latency, typically adding only a few milliseconds to the total authorisation time. The evaluation of rules happens in memory before the request is dispatched to the acquirer.
While the additional logic step exists, the time saved by avoiding a failed transaction or a slow, overloaded processor often results in a faster overall response for the end user. The efficiency of the gateway and the underlying infrastructure determines the final speed.
Can routing rules help in reducing the total cost of interchange?
Yes, routing rules are a primary tool for cost management. By identifying the origin of a card through its BIN, the system can route the transaction to an acquirer in the same region as the issuer.
This qualifies the transaction for local interchange rates rather than the significantly more expensive inter-regional rates. Furthermore, routing can be tuned to favour acquirers with more competitive scheme fee pass-through models or different blended pricing structures for specific card types.
What is the difference between static routing and dynamic failover?
Static routing follows a fixed set of criteria, such as sending all GBP transactions to a specific UK acquirer. Dynamic failover is a reactive mechanism that triggers when the primary path is unavailable.
If the primary acquirer returns a technical error or timeout, the routing engine immediately identifies the failure and reroutes the same transaction attempt to a backup processor. This ensures that the transaction can still be completed even if the initial provider is offline.
Is it possible to route transactions based on 3D Secure results?
Routing rules can incorporate the results of 3DS authentication. For instance, if a transaction successfully clears SCA, it might be routed to an acquirer that offers lower rates for authenticated traffic.
Conversely, if a transaction is exempt from SCA, it could be directed to a processor with a specific risk profile that specialises in handling exemptions. This flexibility ensures that the security status of a payment is leveraged to find the most efficient processing path.
How do routing rules interact with network tokens and tokenisation?
When using network tokens, the routing engine must ensure that the receiving acquirer is capable of processing that specific token type. Not all processors support network tokens in the same way.
The rules can be configured to check the token status and route to a compatible gateway that can decrypt or pass the token to the scheme. This prevents compatibility issues that would otherwise lead to a hard decline if sent to an unsupported processor.
Can I use routing to manage rolling reserves across different acquirers?
Merchants can use routing to manage their financial exposure and liquidity. By distributing volume across multiple acquirers, a merchant can ensure that their total processed volume is not tied to a single rolling reserve.
If one acquirer increases its reserve requirement, routing rules can be adjusted to shift volume to another provider with more favourable settlement terms, thereby managing the business's overall cash flow more effectively.
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