Multi-Acquiring

Last updated:May 30, 2025

As an eCommerce merchant, seamless payment processing is crucial for maintaining your reputation and driving sales. Multi-acquiring strategies help you intelligently route, dispatch, and recover transactions across multiple acquirers—improving success rates, reducing costs, and increasing resilience.

From Routing to Recovery – The Full Spectrum of Payment Orchestration

Modern payment orchestration is no longer about isolated optimizations—it’s about designing a cohesive, adaptive flow that intelligently manages every stage of the transaction lifecycle. This begins with channel routing, which determines the optimal entry point for a transaction. It continues with dispatching, which selects the best merchant account (MID) based on real-time business rules. And when things don’t go as planned, smart retry steps in to recover failed transactions using fallback acquirers. By combining these strategies, merchants can build a layered orchestration model that maximizes approval rates, controls costs, and ensures resilience. Each layer plays a distinct role, but together they form a powerful, unified system for scalable and intelligent payment processing.

Key Takeaways

  • Routing is about which channel the transaction enters.
  • Dispatching is about which MID within that channel processes the transaction.
  • Smart Retry is about what happens after a decline —recovering the transaction with fallback logic.

Choosing the Right Strategy for Your Business

Routing

In a multi-acquirer environment, merchants often face the burden of integrating with multiple channel entities to handle different payment types, brands, and regions. This creates operational complexity, slows down innovation, and increases maintenance overhead.

The Simplified Approach: One Merchant Entity, Intelligent Routing

By integrating once with a single merchant entity ID, merchants can delegate the complexity of orchestration to the platform. Channel Routing intelligently directs transactions to the right channel entity ID based on:
  • Card brand (e.g., Visa, MasterCard, Amex)
  • Payment type (e.g., authorization, debit/sale, credit/refund)
This removes the need for merchants to manage multiple integrations and lets the platform handle the orchestration dynamically.

Routing Use Cases - Real-World Scenarios

Routes transactions to specific channels based on predefined criteria, such as card brand or payment type.

Brand & Payment Type Routing

Scenario: Optimize routing based on both card brand and transaction type.

Solution: Route Visa authorizations to Acquirer A for lower fees, MasterCard credits to Acquirer B for better approval rates.

Outcome: Reduced processing costs and improved success rates through targeted routing.

Traffic Distribution & Controlled Rollout

Scenario: Test new acquirers or features without disrupting your main payment flow.

Solution: Route 50% of traffic to Acquirer A and 50% to Acquirer B for A/B testing, or send 10% of traffic to a new 3DS version while keeping 90% on the current setup.

Outcome: Safe experimentation and data-driven decisions with minimal risk to operations.

Routing Enables Full Orchestration

Once routed to the appropriate channel, the platform can:
  • Dispatch the transaction to the best acquirer based on BIN, geography, or ticket size.
  • Apply Smart Retry or Authorization Optimization if the acquirer is temporarily down or declines the transaction.
This layered orchestration is only possible when the merchant integrates once and lets the platform handle the rest.

Conclusion

Channel routing is a key enabler of smart payment orchestration. By routing transactions based on brand or payment type, merchants can optimize costs, improve approval rates, and reduce complexity—all through a single integration. This approach ensures efficient, resilient, and scalable payment processing in a dynamic eCommerce landscape.


See also