Flexifai, a provider of payment technology focused on challenging markets, has successfully deployed an AI-driven routing engine aimed at enhancing transaction approval rates in emerging markets. Following its implementation, an online operator in Ghana experienced a significant increase in conversion rates, jumping from 43% to 73% within just 30 days, and this occurred without any modifications to the product design or checkout process.
This impressive outcome is attributed to three key features of the routing engine: intelligent routing, which determines payment paths based on real-time performance indicators such as authorization rates and processing latency; cascading logic, which reroutes transactions to different providers when a failure occurs; and automated retry mechanisms that attempt to reprocess declined transactions before the session is abandoned.
The deployment in Ghana faced unique infrastructure challenges. Mobile money systems in the region lack the anti-fraud monitoring capabilities common in card-based environments, creating opportunities for fraud that were difficult for providers to detect. For instance, it became challenging to identify attempts where a single user switched between numerous phone numbers or email addresses.
To combat this, Flexifai established alert systems focused on data fields most closely linked to fraudulent activity, including customer phone numbers, email addresses, and the sequence that data was submitted. This strategy facilitated effective pattern recognition and generated structured reports that helped the operator pinpoint potential high-risk users.
"Ghana is a market with a growing digital economy and genuinely unpredictable payment infrastructure," stated Sofiia, Flexifai's head of sales. "Routing technology that adapts to those conditions in real-time is not a secondary feature—it is essential for achieving conversion in such markets."
Since then, the same strategies have been implemented in Kenya and Zambia, where the lack of anti-fraud infrastructure within mobile money ecosystems poses similar challenges. In these regions, Flexifai utilized data-oriented pattern recognition to enable proactive fraud analysis, overcoming the limited visibility provided by standard payment service provider tools.
The routing engine processes various signals, including user device type, IP address, geo-risk indicators, bank behavior relative to the time of day, characteristics of the issuing bank mapped to the Bank Identification Number (BIN), and real-time gateway load.
Flexifai now supports over 80 local payment methods across multiple regions, including Africa, Europe, Latin America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Its African service includes mobile wallets such as OPay, PalmPay, MTN MoMo, and Airtel, along with USSD systems, agent networks, instant bank transfers, and open banking frameworks. The company has teams operating on the ground in Lagos and throughout Latin America. The routing engine remains active and continually integrates new data signals and providers as the platform evolves.
