Risk
Soft decline
A transient decline (e.g. insufficient funds, do-not-honour, generic) that can usually be recovered with retries.
Soft declines respond to intelligent retries: wait for a balance top-up, re-attempt on a different acquirer or MID, or step up to 3DS. A good retry engine recovers 5–15% of soft declines.
Related terms
Card decline
An authorisation response refusing to fund a transaction, returned by the issuer with a reason code.
Hard decline
A terminal decline (e.g. lost/stolen, pickup card, invalid account) that must not be retried.
Retry logic
Rules that re-attempt a declined transaction across time windows, acquirers, or authentication levels to recover revenue.
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