Smart Routing: Your payments, your rules

For decades, every payment has walked its own path. Some have taken the most efficient route, while others have meandered. When an organisation has initiated a payment – be it cross-border or domestic – the route is often decided automatically. That means everything from which correspondent bank is used to which FX desk or intermediary handles any conversions. The sender has historically had little to no control over these choices.

‍Our Smart Routing flips the model. Designed for banks, non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) and corporate treasury teams, Smart Routing allows organisations to set their own rules, introducing speed, cost and compliance filters. With immediacy the order of the day, it’s reckless not to take greater control.

With cutting-edge solutions easy to integrate and implement, banks, NBFIs and corporate teams cannot afford to use legacy infrastructure and processes. Consider using a 1995 road atlas to navigate a 2025 city. You'd risk missing new, faster routes, navigating to closed businesses, or simply getting stuck in traffic for endless hours. This is exactly what default routing models look like — inflexible processes that slow down payments rather than enabling them.

Default routing often results in transactions processed in slow, cumbersome batches rather than instantaneously, causing delayed settlements, reconciliation headaches, and poor customer experiences. In addition, legacy infrastructure often lacks integrated, real-time fraud controls, which can make it harder for businesses to adapt to evolving regulatory requirements — including those related to PSD2 and ISO 20022 migrations.

Those locked into default routing face rising operational costs, missed revenue from failed or delayed payments, and a constant battle to keep pace with customer expectations. The hidden costs – from maintenance to ongoing manual fixes – add up dramatically over time, both eroding profitability and stifling innovation.

Non-cash transactions are surging, and the need for speed is greater than ever before. Customers, suppliers, and employees all expect money to move at the pace of digital life.

Getnet Platforms’s Smart Routing allows banks, NBFIs and corporates to set the custom rules that work for them. Finance teams can optimise routing based on preferences, and prioritise efficiency above all, selecting routes that maximise straight through processing (STP).

In 2025, this matters. Recent years have seen an explosion in instant schemes like PIX in Brazil or SEPA Instant in Europe. These have reset both expectations and settlement times. In most cases, a transfer that once took two to three days is now expected in two to three seconds. If businesses that operate across borders cannot meet these timelines, it’s likely that their competitors will.

At the same time, regulators are demanding greater transparency and resilience in how payments are processed. Treasury teams are under pressure to optimise both cost and compliance. Default paths and one-size-fits-all routing models were never designed for this new reality. Powered by the Getnet Platforms, our cloud-native platform that processes multiple payment types and schemes through one integrated flow, our Smart Routing gives institutions the resilience, flexibility and transparency they need.

There is a myriad of factors that make a good routing decision. From location to currency, payment method to historical performance, routing should never be left to chance. Smart Routing offers exactly that. With Getnet Platforms’s Smart Routing and the Payments Engine at its core, routing is designed to become a lever for resilience, efficiency, and customer trust.