While Merchants and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) often focus on customer experience or fraud prevention, the way a payment is routed can quietly make or break profitability. Payment Routing isn’t just about moving money from point A to point B; it is about maximizing acceptance, reducing costs, and protecting margins. Yet, many businesses unknowingly lose money at the gateways because their routing strategy is not optimized.

The hidden complexity of Payment Routing

Routing isn’t just a technical detail. With multiple acquirers, fallback logic, and geo-optimization in play, routing trees can get complicated very quickly. And within that complexity, inefficiencies hide:

• Suboptimal routing paths
• Ignored least-cost logic
• Static acquirer priorities

Each of these can silently erode your margins, cutting into profitability without you even noticing.

The real cost of inefficient Routing

For many merchants, inefficiencies in routing don’t appear as obvious red flags. Instead, they show up as:

• Higher processing cost
• Declining authorization rates
• Unnecessary chargebacks
• Missed cost-saving opportunities

Over time, these “invisible leaks” can become a margin drain and significant revenue loss.

Smarter Payment Routing through Orchestration & AI

The good news? Today’s payment orchestration platforms and AI-driven optimization tools are rewriting the rules. Instead of relying on static rules or outdated acquirer preferences, they analyse each transaction in real-time and:

• Choose the lowest-cost acquirer dynamically
• Apply intelligent retry and failover strategies
• Adjust instantly to issuer and network behaviour

And the result? Higher approval rates and healthier margins.

Routing for growth, not just processing.

In payments, the danger isn’t what you see – it’s what you don’t. Inefficient routing may be quietly eating away your bottom line, but with the right infrastructure, you can take back control in your hands.

At Maksu, we’re building next-generation PSP infrastructure with:

• Real-time risk detection to safeguard against fraud
• Intelligent orchestration to optimize every payment path
• Frictionless checkout experiences that keep customers coming back

Because processing payments is no longer enough, it is about routing them strategically to fuel growth.