Apexx Global

1. Overview

The routing engine is at the core of APEXX’s payment orchestration platform. Every card transaction that APEXX processes must pass through routing rules which determine how and where the transaction is processed. The merchants themselves determine the conditions under which the transaction volumes are sent to acquirers and MIDs. 

There are 2 steps when it comes to the routing engine when a merchant is onboarded onto APEXX:

• replicating the pre-APEXX set-up
• enhancing payments and introducing payment optimisation

• Replicating and matching the merchant’s pre-APEXX set-up

During the onboarding phase, our Implementations team will capture all requirements from the merchants to replicate and match via the routing engine the pre-APEXX set-up (i.e. which acquirer or MID to send volumes to etc.) to ensure a seamless transition. This also allows APEXX to gather data on the existing set-up to then move onto the second stage: payment optimisation.

• Payment optimisation

APEXX uses custom dashboards to establish benchmarks as to the merchant payment’s performance on various key elements including acceptance rates and costs. Then we will look at the  performance utilising different routing rules from what the existing set-up from a cost and acceptance perspective. 

For example, APEXX may identify poor acceptance rate on a specific routing rule, and discuss with the merchant an alternative solution such as sending the volumes to a different acquirer or using available features like Cascading and Smart Split to implement A/B testing.

2. How routing works

As transactions come into APEXX, the routing engine evaluates them against configured rules. These rules operate on a hierarchical priority system. Each rule includes defined conditions—such as currency, card type, issuer country, or amount—and is checked in order of priority until a matching rule is found.

The routing engine must identify not just which acquirer to send a transaction to, but also which specific MID to use. This is essential for merchants working with multiple acquiring partners or having several MIDs for regional, business-type, or card-type reasons.

3. Configuring Routing Rules

Routing rules are created within the Atomic portal using a flexible drag-and-drop interface. The minimum requirement for a routing rule is a currency condition. From there, various additional conditions can be defined, including transaction amount, card type (debit/credit), channel (e.g., e-commerce or MOTO), issuer details, card product, scheme (Visa, Mastercard, etc.), and digital wallet type (Apple Pay, Google Pay).

More complex routing logic allows for granular targeting. For instance, a rule might send high-value GBP transactions from specific card-types to an acquirer that offers better rates for those card types. To ensure this logic functions correctly, specific rules must be given a higher priority than broader, general ones.

The APEXX Routing Engine ensures that a transaction is always routed somewhere valid via validation checks which prevent configurations that could in failed payments.

Once a rule has been created on the Routing Engine, it will go into a draft state to then be reviewed and validated for a “four-eye” check.

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