With an increasingly online, global payments markets forecast to be worth $52.4 trillion/year by 2026, merchants must offer all customers' preferred payment methods for goods/services, 24/7\. Failing to offer the right payment methods is estimated to cost businesses $212bn/year. The payments industry has historically been dominated by a few large processing companies. An increasing reliance on e-commerce and the significant rise in volume of payments brought by this has been a significant change in a once stagnant industry. Innovation, competition and technological change are on the rise and payment processors have had to react in order to stay relevant. Despite this rate of change the power within the merchant/processor relationship has remained securely with the processors themselves, often at the detriment of the merchants. Comcarde has created a unique platform offering a payment Payment Resilience capability (payments switched to payment processor 2, if payment processor 1 fails) to address the frustration of payment outages, currently being trialled with a PLC customer. This project aims to further this to develop the next step change within the industry, by creating a 'logic gap' between merchants and processors. An independent platform with **Intelligent Routing** capability, sitting between merchants and payment processors, providing an unprecedented level of control over payment management, bringing with it significantly greater fee negotiating powers. In addition, the risk involved in connecting new payment processors can be substantially reduced, what was once a time consuming and expensive process can be completed efficiently and economically. This reduced risk allows merchants to trial up-and-coming and innovative yet unproven new payment service providers by significantly reducing the barriers to entry and enhancing the opportunities. With Innovate UK support, a 9 month programme of experimental development is required to advance this **Intelligent Routing** capability with a proof of concept pilot validated in a live environment. If successful, commercial exploitation will provide significant benefits to merchants of any size, in any industry, worldwide.