Cost Optimization Agent
Reduce payment-processing cost within acceptance, risk, provider, and commercial constraints.
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Protect margin on every payment.
Evaluate the economic paths available for an eligible payment and recommend or select the lowest-cost viable option without treating cost as the only objective.
- Route economics
- Fee intelligence
- Commercial constraints
What the agent optimizes#
- provider and acquirer cost for the eligible transaction;
- available local, debit, or lower-cost rails;
- interchange qualification and avoidable downgrades;
- scheme, network, authorization, and cross-border fees;
- FX and settlement economics;
- provider commitments, minimum volumes, caps, and exclusivities;
- the expected acceptance and risk impact of a cheaper route.
Use Payment Cost Optimization for the complete data map behind these analyses.
Decision boundary#
The agent cannot select a provider or rail that is unavailable for the account, market, method, credential, or transaction. A nominally cheaper route is rejected when it violates an acceptance floor, risk requirement, provider contract, technical eligibility rule, or customer-experience constraint.
Measure financial impact#
Track total processing cost and effective basis points together with authorization, conversion, fraud, refunds, and operational exceptions. Attribute savings to an observed cost component instead of comparing only provider list prices.
For controlled traffic, compare like-for-like cohorts and include downstream settlement evidence. Authorization-time estimates should be reconciled against the fees that actually clear.
Operate safely#
- Keep the current static routing policy as the timeout and rollback path.
- Encode provider commitments and route eligibility before exposing traffic.
- Separate estimated savings from settled savings in reporting.
- Alert on acceptance, latency, fraud, and cost guardrail breaches.
- Revalidate strategies when a provider rate card, network fee, market, or connection changes.