How the routing enginedecides.

With Smart routing off, a rule sends payments exactly the way you chose: Always this provider, Try in order, or Backup only on technical errors. The engine's estimate is recorded beside the decision, never used to change it. With it on, Payshen ranks only the providers you list on the rule, or every provider when you list none, and of those only the ones that can take the payment: wrong currency, country, method or an amount outside a provider's limits rule a provider out before anything is ranked. If none of the providers you listed can take it, the payment is refused, never sent to one you left out. The share of its payments Smart routing does not decide tries your providers in the order you listed them. A payment that matches no rule uses Try in order across all your providers, oldest connection first, so routing works from the first payment.

Live routing learns from live payments only; test payments teach Test mode on their own, so you can watch it learn before you go live, and never reach live routing. It does not count declines that are about the customer (insufficient funds, an expired card, a failed authentication) against a provider. Hosted and 3-D Secure payments count once their final outcome is known, once each. Older evidence fades with time, so a provider that improved is noticed. Beside its longer record each provider has a short one, its last 50 or so results: when the two clearly disagree, as when a provider suddenly declines far more, the recent results decide until the record catches up.

Rule changes go into a draft that routes nothing. You can replay it over your last 30 days of real payments (nothing is charged, written or learned) and check where a single payment would go, then publish it as a new version; every earlier version stays a rollback away. Test another route sends a share of one rule's payments, 5% to 50%, another way. A test starts only when you confirm it, and one on live payments asks you to confirm that it routes real customers' payments. The result is read with a test that stays valid however often it is looked at, and nothing is decided before each side has 100 payments with an answer. Payshen makes the test route the rule on its own only when it clearly earns more per payment, in a new published version (you can also make it the rule yourself); a safety limit stops the test as soon as it approves clearly fewer. Every automatic decision is recorded with the evidence behind it.

The engine chooses among payment providers for a merchant's payments. It does not decide whether a person may pay, and Payshen never holds or moves the money. On that basis we assess it as outside the high-risk uses of the EU AI Act and outside automated decisions about individuals under GDPR Article 22. That assessment is with our counsel; this page will say so when it is confirmed.