Orchestration
Routing is a policy, not a branch in your checkout
Platforms usually acquire their second processor the hard way — during an outage, a pricing renegotiation or a market expansion. Orchestration exists so that the second one is a configuration change rather than a rewrite.
State of the work
- Processors integrated
- None. Routing has nothing to route between yet.
- Depends on
- The gateway contract, which depends on the vault.
- Hard requirement
- A timeout must never become a double charge.
- Not yet decided
- Which processor is first, and on what commercial terms.
What sits behind the abstraction
One contract in front, many processors behind, and the mapping between them expressed as policy that can be read and changed.
Merchant request
One normalised payment call
Routing policy
Evaluated per transaction
Processor adapter
Provider-specific translation
Acquirer
Where the money actually moves
Diagram · Intended design. No processor or acquirer is connected, in production or otherwise.
Routing inputs under consideration
- Geography and currency
- Card brand and payment method
- Merchant preference and contractual commitments
- Cost of acceptance
- Historical approval rate
- Processor health
- Transaction type — one-off, recurring, merchant-initiated
- Regulatory constraints applying to the corridor
What routing must never do
- Produce a double charge when a processor times out mid-authorisation
- Retry onto a second processor without knowing the first one's outcome
- Violate card network, acquirer or contractual rules to reach a cheaper path
- Bypass sanctions, anti-money-laundering or know-your-business controls
- Make reconciliation ambiguous about which processor holds the money
Reconciliation is part of orchestration
A routing layer that cannot tell you where the money ended up has moved the problem rather than solved it.
Gross and net
Gross payment, processor fees, network and acquirer fees where the provider exposes them, and the net actually settled.
Deductions
Refunds, chargebacks and reserves attributed to the payments they came from, not aggregated into an unexplained difference.
Payout lineage
Payout identifier, payout date and the bank receipt state, so a figure in a finance system can be traced to a deposit.
Currency
Conversion recorded where it happened, at the rate applied, rather than inferred afterwards.
Provider references
The processor's own reconciliation references retained, so a dispute can be discussed in the provider's language.
No card data
Finance systems receive accounting events. They are never a route to a card number.