Approval rate optimization
Every declined card is a customer who already said yes
Most businesses lose 4 to 6% of revenue to declines, and nobody reports it: your provider sees an authorization response, not a lost sale. We find out why payments fail, and fix the ones that should never have failed.
Why payments fail
Most declines are not fraud
A large share of refusals are soft declines: the issuer was unsure, the route was wrong or the data was thin. Those are recoverable, and recovering them costs nothing but setup.
- Decline code analysis. We group every refusal by reason, issuer, BIN, country and card type, so the fixable ones stand out from the ones that are not.
- Smart retries. Soft declines retried at the right moment, on the right route, without touching hard declines or breaking scheme rules.
- 3DS tuning. Authentication where it lifts approvals and exemptions where it only adds friction.
- Local acquiring. Issuers approve domestic transactions more readily. Local acquiring raises approvals and cuts cross-border fees in one move.
- BIN routing and a second provider. Send each card to the acquirer that approves it best, and fail over when one does not.
- The right MCC and data. Correct category codes and richer transaction data give issuers the confidence to approve.
The arithmetic
One approval point is often worth more than the whole fee saving
On $50M a year of card volume, lifting approvals from 88% to 93% recovers about $2.8M in sales that were already won. The fee on that volume is a fraction of it. That is why we look at approvals first.
- Recovered revenue lands at your full margin, not the processing margin.
- A customer declined once often does not come back.
- Subscriptions lose the whole lifetime value, not one payment.
Questions
About approval rates
What is a good card approval rate?
It depends on vertical, markets and card mix. Domestic card-not-present traffic in a low-risk vertical often approves above 90%; cross-border and higher-risk traffic approves lower. The useful number is your rate against businesses like yours, which is what we benchmark.
What is a soft decline?
A refusal that may succeed if the payment is retried later, routed differently or authenticated with 3DS, for example insufficient funds or do not honor. Hard declines, such as a stolen card, should never be retried.
How does local acquiring raise approvals?
Issuing banks approve domestic transactions more readily than cross-border ones. Processing a card through an acquirer in the cardholder's own country usually raises approvals and lowers cross-border fees at the same time.
Find out what your payments could do
A 30 minute call is enough to see where approvals leak, what you are missing and where you overpay. Nothing to prepare, nothing confidential to send.