Merchants Find Revenue Hiding Behind the Decline Button

In a fragmented payments environment, how intelligently infrastructure decides what should happen to every transaction is becoming a key definition of payments performance and success.

The August edition of PYMNTS Intelligence’s Optimizing Payments Tracker® Series, a collaboration with PayPal Open, found that authorization, routing, cost management and fraud prevention are converging into the same real-time decisioning infrastructure.

Payments failures affect an estimated 1 in 5 eCommerce orders globally, creating roughly $47 billion in annual revenue leakage. Merchants in the United States lose approximately $157 billion annually to false declines. At the same time, about 42% of consumers abandon their carts after a failed payment.

Rather than optimizing those functions independently, payments systems are beginning to evaluate them simultaneously before determining the best path for each transaction.

The Transaction Is Becoming a Decision, and Merchants Are Getting Smarter

Historically, merchants often treated authorization, fraud, routing and processing costs as separate operating problems. Fraud teams optimized risk rules, payments teams negotiated acquiring relationships, finance departments monitored fees and engineering teams worked on checkout performance.

As commerce fragments across cards, wallets, account-to-account payments, local payment methods, multiple acquirers and real-time rails, however, the harder problem is no longer transporting a transaction. It is deciding, in milliseconds, how that transaction should move, which credentials should be used, where it should be routed and how much risk should be tolerated.

Optimizing any one variable in isolation can produce a worse overall outcome. Sending a payment to one acquirer rather than another may improve authorization but increase processing cost. Tightening a fraud rule may reduce losses while simultaneously rejecting valuable customers, and routing through a local provider may raise acceptance rates in one market but perform differently in another.

Read the report: The Performance Gap: Why Every Transaction Is a Growth Opportunity

The report found that 69% of companies using core orchestration capabilities, including routing automation, account updater services and network tokens, achieve approval rates above 97%, compared with 32% of companies relying on manual routing.

Even relatively small improvements matter. Moving an enterprise merchant from a 92% approval rate toward 96% can represent millions of dollars in recovered sales without acquiring a single additional customer.

The broader consequence is that payments infrastructure is moving upstream in the commercial strategy of the enterprise. The next generation of platforms is being designed less like transaction processors and more like decision engines, continuously balancing three objectives, including maximizing approvals, minimizing costs and controlling risk.

Fraud prevention is undergoing a similar reframing. Anti-fraud measures contribute to customer churn at 56% of retailers and 54% of eCommerce companies in the U.S. Meanwhile, 85% of U.S. merchants identified preventing fraud without damaging the customer experience as their biggest challenge.

The goal is not simply to stop more fraud. It is to determine which transactions can safely be approved.

AI-driven risk systems, as a result, are moving closer to the authorization layer, where behavioral, network and historical signals can influence decisions in real time rather than through static rules applied independently of payment performance.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.