Approval rate reporting
Issuer decisions vary by decline code, BIN, authentication result and retry timing. Authorisation approval rate reporting gives risk and treasury teams transaction-level evidence, with Cardflo capturing scheme responses and classifying soft and hard declines.
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- Reporting
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Cardflo’s approval rate reporting provides detailed insights into transaction outcomes across your payments ecosystem. Gain a granular understanding of performance metrics through customisable dashboards and comprehensive data exports, allowing for precise analysis of key influencing factors.
Monitor your transaction success rates effectively, breaking down performance by various dimensions such as acquirer, issuer, and card type. This detailed visibility supports proactive identification of operational efficiencies and areas for strategic improvement within your payment processing.
Approval rate reporting offers an in-depth comparison of performance across various card types and currencies, highlighting the impact of scheme dynamics. This allows for targeted optimisation of the MID portfolio, boosting overall transaction success.
Approval rate reporting overview
Cardflo offers a reporting surface providing immediate access to your transaction approval rates, presented across a range of operational dimensions. The platform compiles raw transaction responses, standardising disparate acquirer codes into a unified dataset for consistent metric calculation.
This standardisation simplifies comparative analysis across different processing partners and payment methods, giving you a clear, objective view of overall performance.
Our reporting tools enable merchants to dissect approval rates according to specific criteria. You can examine performance based on the merchant ID (MID), the issuing bank, or by the first six digits of the card number (BIN).
Furthermore, analysis extends to geographical factors like the cardholder's country of origin and the currency used for the transaction, providing comprehensive segmentation.
Baselines and trend lines sit alongside the headline figure, so a weekly review can separate normal variation from a genuine movement in acceptance.
Thresholds can be set per segment, which keeps alerting proportionate: a two-point drift on a small market matters far less than the same drift on your largest MID, and the reporting reflects that difference rather than treating every segment alike.
How approval rate reporting works
Data ingestion and normalisation
Transaction authorisation responses from all connected acquirers and gateways are ingested into Cardflo’s data warehouse. Disparate response codes and formats are normalised into a standardised taxonomy, ensuring consistent interpretation of approval and decline events across all processing partners. This process creates a unified dataset for accurate reporting.
Metric calculation and aggregation
Approval rates are calculated as the percentage of successful authorisations against all submitted authorisation requests. These metrics are then aggregated across a multitude of dimensions, including MID, BIN, country, currency, card scheme, and specific decline reasons. Data is processed continuously, maintaining high freshness for analysis.
Dashboard presentation and exports
Aggregated data is presented through customisable dashboards, allowing users to visualise trends and filter by desired dimensions. Users can export raw or aggregated data in CSV format for offline analysis or integrate directly with their internal systems via dedicated reporting APIs. The interface supports various time-series views.
Alerting and performance monitoring
Merchants can configure custom alert thresholds for critical approval rate metrics. Notifications are triggered when specified performance deviations occur, such as a 5% drop in approval rate for a particular acquirer or card type. This proactive alerting supports rapid identification of potential issues.
Why approval rate reporting matters
Identify performance discrepancies
Pinpoint underperforming acquirers or specific card types that exhibit lower approval rates compared to benchmarks. Detailed reporting by BIN and issuer reveals if certain card segments or issuing banks consistently contribute to higher declines. Understanding these patterns allows merchants to investigate underlying causes, such as specific fraud rules or network limitations, and address them directly with partners or internal teams.
Optimise operational efficiency
Leverage granular decline reason reporting to identify common transaction failure points. For instance, a recurring 'do not honour' decline code from a specific region may indicate a need to adjust fraud parameters or local processing logic. Proactive monitoring of approval rate trends, with alerts for significant drops, helps maintain payment flow stability and minimises revenue impact from unforeseen processing issues.
Approval rate reporting use cases
Monthly acceptance reporting pack
A global online retailer uses Cardflo's reporting to compare approval rates across their various acquirers in Europe and Asia. They identify that their APAC acquirer consistently has a 3% lower approval rate for Visa transactions originating from Japan. This insight prompts them to engage with the acquirer to understand specific local processing nuances or identify potential misconfigurations impacting that market.
Route comparison on matched traffic
A subscription box company observes a sudden 7% decline in approval rates for recurring payments from UK-issued Mastercard transactions. Cardflo's reporting, segmented by decline reason, reveals a spike in 'issuer unavailable' responses. The payments team uses this data to contact their primary UK acquirer for investigation, mitigating potential revenue loss from failed renewals and rectifying the issue promptly.
Benchmarking a newly opened market
A vendor selling downloadable software uses approval rate reporting to assess the performance of a new payment method recently integrated. They monitor the approval rate for transactions processed through this new option, comparing it against established payment methods. This allows them to quickly evaluate its effectiveness and decide whether to promote it more widely or adjust their payment routing strategies.
Travel booking platform
A large travel platform notices a consistent, albeit small, dip in approval rates for high-value transactions exceeding £1,000 from a specific BIN range. By examining the decline reasons, they see an increase in 'security violation' codes. This information guides them in adjusting their internal fraud screening rules for that particular card segment, aiming to reduce false positives without increasing overall risk.
Approval rate reporting 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.
Methodology: these figures are illustrative ranges drawn from published industry data and observed merchant cohorts, not guarantees. Actual results depend on your risk profile, card mix, geography and acquiring setup, and are confirmed only in your own pricing and approval terms.
Related terms
Talk to our team about a live rollout across our acquirer partners' rails.
What you get with Approval rate reporting
- View approval rates segmented by acquirer, merchant ID (MID), and issuer institution.
- Analyse transaction success based on card BIN, card product type, and geographical origin.
- Review performance across different currencies and specific decline codes returned by processors.
- Approval rates are calculated using all authorisation responses against submitted transactions.
- Declined transactions are categorised by the specific reason codes provided by the gateway or acquirer.
- Data freshness is typically within five minutes of transaction processing, ensuring near real-time insights.
- Reports are accessible via an online dashboard and exportable in CSV or API formats.
- Set custom alert thresholds for significant drops in approval rates across any dimension.
- Reporting supports weekly operational reviews to track performance against established benchmarks.
- Compare approval rate trends over various time periods, including daily, weekly, and monthly views.
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.
Should the approval rate be calculated on attempts or on unique orders?
Both, and the pair matters more than either figure alone. An attempt-based rate counts every authorisation request, so heavy reattempting flatters or depresses it depending on where the reattempts land.
An order-based rate asks whether the customer eventually paid, which is the figure the board cares about. Cardflo publishes both against the same traffic, with the denominator fixed and stated, so a change in reporting method never looks like a change in performance.
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 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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