Recurly is excited to announce Custom Gateway Routing, an important new capability that gives our customers unlimited flexibility in routing payments—either the initial transaction or subsequent renewal transactions—to a specific gateway. This lets them take advantage of the benefits a certain gateway may offer for specific types of transactions, for example, based on geolocation or for specific products.

Using a designated gateway for certain transactions provides a host of benefits such as higher acceptance rates, lower processing costs, simplified reconciliation, and mitigated risk. Customers inform Recurly which gateway to use by simply passing a value to Recurly via our API or Client Library.

Custom Gateway Routing solves for a number of payment routing scenarios including:

  • Financial, line-of-business, and product-based routing: Businesses get tremendous flexibility through the ability to route transactions based on meaningful criteria for their business. For example, transactions could be routed by product line, by business unit, by price, or some other metric.

The ability to route transactions to specific gateways lets merchants separate transactions at the gateway level according to their merchant account (MID). This lets them keep revenue from different product lines or business units separate. It also provides for a streamlined reconciliation flow across business units or product lines, which saves the finance team significant time.

For example, a streaming video company might use one gateway to process sign-ups for a special event—perhaps a one-time event that entails special licensing or financial agreements. Having the ability to route to a specific gateway can give the streaming service economies of scale regarding costs and also allows them to produce a report with results specific to only that event, which can aid in accurately determining licensing fees.

Unlike other platforms, having a single Recurly site that uses multiple gateways allows for a single, cohesive view of subscribers, subscription plans, and transaction data, while still taking advantage of the benefits of different gateways for different transaction types.

  • Geolocation-based routing: Subscription businesses that serve a global subscriber base benefit from having gateway-routing options. For example, businesses with subscribers in the EU may prefer to route those transactions to an EU-based gateway, while routing their US-based business to a US-based gateway. This typically results in higher acceptance rates and lower transaction (cross-border) fees.

Custom Gateway Routing allows Recurly customers to define the gateway they would like to use for different transactions based on billing address, shipping address, card BIN information, or IP address.

  • Optimize renewals and retries: Recurly customers can now also specify the gateway to be used for subscription renewal transactions. They may also choose a different gateway for retries if the first renewal transaction fails. This provides for additional control beyond what the business may already have set up for their dunning and retry cycle.

Note: A prerequisite for each use case listed above is multiple gateways must be set up in Recurly that use the same payment method, for example: two credit card gateways active and enabled. The business will need to define the routing logic on their end and programmatically inform Recurly which gateway to use.

Bringing It All Together

Recurly’s Custom Gateway Routing gives our customers flexibility and control in choosing which gateway to use for different transactions. This provides for higher acceptance rates, lower processing costs, simplified reconciliation, and mitigated risk. For more information, view the documentation.

Custom Gateway Routing is available on our Pro and Enterprise plans. Standard Routing, based only on currency or payment method, is available on all plans.

Want to learn more? Talk to a Recurly expert at (844) 732-8759 or sign up for a demo below.