If you’ve ever seen a merchant account shut down without warning, you know how unforgiving the payments ecosystem can be. A business can look healthy on Monday and be offline by Friday, with funds frozen and revenue halted for months. For acquiring banks and ISOs, those failures translate into regulatory scrutiny, fines, and churn, often discovered only after it’s too late.
Today, we’re excited to invest in RouteSense as they build real-time merchant health intelligence for the payments industry. The founding team combines Stephen and Colin Martin, multi-generational payments operators whose family helped found the Electronic Transactions Association, with Robert Matthews, former CTO of Midigator and SVP of Dispute Technology at Equifax. Together, they’re bringing long-overdue visibility to one of the most opaque layers of financial infrastructure.
The Opportunity
Sudden failure is the norm: Merchant accounts can be terminated with little notice, freezing funds for up to 180 days and permanently disrupting businesses.
Regulatory pressure is increasing: Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) lowers acceptable fraud and dispute thresholds to 0.3% and shifts enforcement to acquiring banks.
Large, multi-sided market: RouteSense targets a $42.2B serviceable market spanning high-risk merchants, ISOs, and acquiring banks.
What RouteSense Actually Builds
Think of RouteSense as a health-monitoring and routing layer for payment infrastructure:
MIDAS score: A FICO-style, real-time health score for every merchant account.
Unified data layer: Aggregates transactions, disputes, and fraud signals into a single, real-time view.
Health-aware routing: Automatically routes transactions away from accounts trending toward failure.
Portfolio dashboards: Tools for ISOs and banks to monitor thousands of merchant accounts and stay compliant.
RouteSense doesn’t replace processors or banks. It wraps existing rails with intelligence that helps operators intervene before irreversible damage occurs.
When payment risk becomes visible in real time, the system stops being reactive and starts being governable. We believe that starts with one merchant avoiding a shutdown and extends to banks confidently onboarding high-risk volume without fear of regulatory fallout.
If you’re building at the intersection of payments, infrastructure, and real-world economics, our inbox is always open. For now, we’re proud to welcome RouteSense to the Redbud ecosystem.
