Today we are releasing Smart Routing v2, the most significant upgrade to our payment orchestration engine since PaymentHooks launched. The new system leverages a gradient-boosted decision tree trained on over 200 million anonymized transactions to predict which gateway will yield the highest authorization rate for any given payment characteristics. Early adopters have reported a 7-12% improvement in overall authorization rates within the first 30 days of activation.
At the core of v2 is our new real-time feature extraction pipeline. For every incoming transaction, the engine evaluates card BIN data, issuing bank geography, transaction amount, merchant category code, time of day, and historical performance signals. These features are scored against each connected gateway in under 15 milliseconds, ensuring zero perceptible latency impact on the checkout experience. The model retrains nightly on rolling 90-day windows, so it continuously adapts to shifting issuer behavior and gateway performance.
We have also introduced a cost-aware optimization mode. Merchants can now set a cost ceiling per transaction, and the router will factor in interchange rates, gateway fees, and currency conversion costs alongside authorization probability. This allows finance teams to balance approval rates against processing expense, a feature frequently requested by enterprise customers processing cross-border transactions across multiple corridors.
Smart Routing v2 is available immediately on all Professional and Enterprise plans. Existing routing rules and gateway priorities remain in effect as fallbacks. To enable the AI-powered mode, navigate to Settings, then Routing, then enable the Adaptive Routing toggle. We recommend running in shadow mode for one week to compare model decisions against your current configuration before switching to full automatic mode.