Approval rate reporting
Understand your transaction success with Cardflo's approval rate reporting. Gain insights into the factors influencing your payment approvals across all acquirers and payment methods.
Identify trends and areas for optimisation to improve conversion rates and revenue capture.
- Category
- Reporting
- Capabilities
- 10
- Available on
- All plans
The overview
Approval rate reporting serves as a critical diagnostic tool within the payments stack, allowing merchants to analyse the ratio of successful authorisations against total transaction attempts. This metric sits between the checkout and settlement layers, providing visibility into issuer behaviour and acquirer performance.
By scrutinising the delta between total traffic and successful captures, businesses can identify where revenue is lost to technical declines, insufficient funds, or risk based refusals.
Effective reporting requires the categorisation of decline codes, distinguishing between hard declines that necessitate no further action and soft declines that may be rescued through retry logic.
Monitoring these trends across different Merchant Identification Numbers (MIDs) and card schemes ensures that any degradation in performance is detected before it impacts total processing volume.
This granularity is essential for maintaining a stable payment environment, particularly when managing multiple acquirer relationships or cross-border transaction flows where success rates frequently fluctuate.
How it works
Data aggregation at gateway level
The system collects raw authorisation responses from every connected acquirer and PSP. Each transaction is recorded with its associated metadata, including card BIN, currency, and geographical data.
This creates a unified data set that removes the complexity of managing disparate reports from multiple individual financial partners.
Decline code categorisation
Raw response codes from issuers are mapped into standardised categories. The system differentiates between 05 'Do Not Honour' responses, 51 'Insufficient Funds', and 3DS authentication failures.
This technical mapping allows merchants to understand if a decline is due to customer behaviour or a technical issue within the routing path.
Segmentation and filtering
Users apply filters to the aggregated data to isolate specific performance variables. This includes segmenting by MCC, payment method, or specific acquirer.
By isolating these variables, a merchant can determine if a low approval rate is specific to one corridor or a systemic issue across their entire payment infrastructure.
Comparative trend analysis
The reporting interface compares historical performance against real-time data. This allows for the identification of anomalies, such as a sudden drop in approval rates following a scheme update or a change in SCA enforcement.
Identifying these shifts early enables technical teams to adjust routing or verification logic.
Why it matters
Diagnostic revenue recovery
Understanding why transactions fail is the first step in minimising revenue leakage. If reporting shows a high volume of soft declines due to temporary technical errors, merchants can implement intelligent retry strategies.
Without granular reporting, these failed transactions are often ignored, leading to lower customer lifetime value and increased acquisition costs. Systematic analysis transforms raw decline data into actionable intelligence for treasury and product teams.
Acquirer performance benchmarking
In a multi-acquirer setup, approval rate reporting provides the objective data required to hold financial partners accountable. If one acquirer consistently shows lower success rates for specific card types compared to another, the merchant can reconfigure their smart routing logic.
This data-driven approach ensures that volume is always directed toward the path of least resistance, defending the bottom line from suboptimal processing.
Use cases
Cross-border expansion tracking
A merchant entering a new market uses reporting to compare local versus cross-border approval rates. This helps determine if establishing a local entity and acquiring relationship is necessary to bypass regional issuer restrictions.
Subscription billing optimisation
Recurring revenue businesses analyse approval rates on Merchant Initiated Transactions (MIT) to identify the best time of month for dunning. This level of reporting helps reduce involuntary churn by highlighting peak success windows.
3DS friction analysis
E-commerce retailers use reporting to see the impact of SCA on conversion. By comparing 3DS successful challenge rates against frictionless flows, they can fine-tune their risk threshold to maximise both security and approvals.
By the numbers
Typical approval rates vary significantly by industry and region. High-risk e-commerce may see lower averages while domestic physical retail often sits at the higher end of this industry spectrum.
Industry data suggests that a portion of failed transactions can be recovered through intelligent retry logic informed by granular reporting and decline code analysis.
Using reporting to optimise routing and achieve local acquiring status typically yields a measured increase in authorisation success for international transaction traffic.
Related terms
Talk to our team about a live rollout on your acquiring stack.
What you get with Approval rate reporting
- Analysis of authorisation success across multiple merchant identification numbers and global acquirers.
- Categorisation of ISO 8583 response codes into actionable hard and soft decline reports.
- Real-time monitoring of approval fluctuations to detect issuer side technical outages early.
- Granular filtering by card scheme, including Visa, Mastercard, and secondary local payment methods.
- Performance comparison between 3D Secure authenticated transactions and frictionless authorisation attempts.
- Tracking success rates for initial transaction attempts versus subsequent automated retry cycles.
- Historical benchmarking of monthly approval data to identify seasonal trends or scheme impacts.
- Segmentation by issuer country to identify regional decline patterns and cross-border frictions.
- Exportable data sets for internal treasury audits and third-party business intelligence platform integration.
- Visibility into Merchant Category Code performance levels for diversified platform businesses.
A short scoping call, then a written plan for your MIDs.
Questions about Approval rate reporting
What is the difference between an approval rate and a conversion rate in payment reporting?
Conversion rate typically refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a checkout, influenced by UI design and pricing. Approval rate is a technical payment metric specifically calculating the percentage of authorisation requests that successfully receive an 'Approved' status from the issuer.
A merchant might have a high checkout conversion rate but a low approval rate if their payment routing is inefficient or if they process high-risk traffic. Approval rate reporting focuses on the payment stack's efficiency rather than the marketing funnel's effectiveness.
How can reporting help distinguish between a soft decline and a hard decline?
The reporting system interprets specific ISO response codes provided by the issuer. A hard decline, such as 'Stolen Card' (04) or 'Account Closed' (14), indicates a permanent failure where retries are prohibited.
A soft decline, such as 'Insufficient Funds' (51) or 'System Error' (96), suggests a temporary issue.
Comprehensive reporting allows a merchant to isolate these soft declines and apply retry logic or account updater services to recover the transaction, which is not possible without granular code visibility.
Why do my approval rates differ between various acquirers for the same card types?
Acquirers have different relationships with issuers, varying risk appetites, and different technical configurations. One acquirer may have better local connectivity in a specific region, leading to higher trust from local issuers.
Reporting identifies these discrepancies by segmenting performance by acquirer and card BIN. This enables merchants to implement smart routing, directing transactions to the acquirer most likely to achieve a successful authorisation based on historical performance data.
Can approval rate reporting identify issues with 3D Secure 2.0 implementation?
Yes. Reporting can isolate transactions where 3DS was requested but the authentication failed or timed out.
By comparing the 'Authenticated' status against the final 'Authorised' status, merchants can see if the friction of 3DS is causing abandonment or if issuers are refusing transactions despite successful authentication.
This is critical under PSD2 and SCA regulations to ensure that security requirements do not disproportionately degrade the successful transaction volume.
What impact does the Merchant Category Code (MCC) have on these reports?
Issuers often apply different risk profiles based on the MCC. High-risk codes may face more scrutiny, leading to lower baseline approval rates.
Reporting allows businesses with multiple services or sub-merchants to see performance at the MCC level.
If an entity is misclassified or if a specific code is being targeted for increased scrutiny by schemes, the reporting will show a statistical anomaly compared to industry averages for that category.
How does reporting assist in managing cross-border transaction success?
Cross-border transactions frequently suffer from lower approval rates due to issuer fraud filters prioritising local traffic. Reporting provides visibility into which specific countries or issuer BINs are declining transactions.
This data informs the merchant's expansion strategy, such as whether to pursue local acquiring in a specific territory to improve successful authorisation rates by making the transactions appear domestic to the local issuer.
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