Best Practices to Improve Payment Authorization Rates Globally

Improving payment approval rates is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue without acquiring more customers. Yet many merchants still overlook it, focusing instead on traffic or pricing strategies. In this guide, we’ll break down the main reasons for low approval performance and share actionable practices to optimize it across regions, providers, and payment methods.

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Why do global merchants struggle with payment approval?

Operating in multiple countries often means juggling acquirers, currencies, fraud systems, and user preferences. When this complexity isn’t managed well, it leads to failed transactions—even when the customer has sufficient funds.

Some common issues include:

• Using a single PSP across all markets
• Routing payments without performance-based logic
• Applying fraud rules uniformly without local context
• Limited support for local payment methods

Each of these can contribute to a lower-than-expected approval rate, particularly in cross-border scenarios.

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What’s a healthy benchmark for approval rates?

While numbers vary, approval rates above 90% are generally acceptable. However, for high-volume merchants, even small improvements have a significant impact. Moving from 90% to 94% could mean millions in recovered revenue annually.

To contextualize your own performance, consider reviewing industry-specific benchmarks or conducting an internal audit of declines by region and method. This helps identify if technical failures, fraud rules, or issuer behavior are driving most of the rejections.

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What causes false declines?

False declines happen when legitimate transactions are rejected. These are especially harmful because they impact real customers who may not return. They typically result from one of three issues:

1. Overly strict fraud filters: Legacy fraud systems can reject legitimate transactions, especially new customers or cross-border cards.
2. Poor routing decisions: Transactions may be sent to underperforming acquirers or fail due to technical timeouts.
3. Lack of fallback providers: When a primary gateway fails, many systems don’t retry the payment elsewhere—resulting in immediate decline.

This leads to revenue leakage, customer frustration, and operational costs in the form of manual reviews or chargeback disputes. Platforms like Yuno help mitigate this by enabling real-time routing logic and seamless failover between providers.

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What’s the potential revenue impact?

Even a minor uplift in approval rate can have a large revenue impact. For a merchant processing $100M annually:

• At 90% approval, $10M in payments are declined
• Improving to 93% recovers $3M without additional traffic or marketing investment.

Because of this direct link to revenue, approval rate optimization has become a focus for CFOs and Heads of Payments. In some companies, it’s now treated as a strategic KPI alongside customer acquisition cost (CAC) and conversion rate.

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How can routing optimization improve payment success?

Payments don’t just fail because of fraud or insufficient funds—many are rejected due to inefficient routing decisions. When every transaction is sent through a single provider or along a static route, issues like latency, processor downtime, or poor acquirer performance can lead to avoidable declines.

A more effective approach is to dynamically route payments based on real-time conditions: issuer response rates, card type, BIN range, geography, or even time of day. This allows merchants to optimize for performance and cost while reducing the likelihood of failure.

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Why is payment orchestration essential for global businesses?

Coordinating payments across multiple markets requires flexibility, visibility, and control, especially for merchants operating at scale. A single PSP or gateway rarely offers the adaptability needed to optimize performance across different regions, payment methods, and regulatory environments.

Payment orchestration provides a unified layer that connects multiple providers, centralizes fraud and routing logic, and simplifies reporting. It also enables more advanced use cases, such as supporting subscriptions or recurring billing with dynamic retries, token management, and geographic logic—all from one infrastructure.

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What role does fraud prevention play in authorization rates?

Fraud prevention has a direct impact on payment approval, both positive and negative. Tools like 3DS or behavioral biometrics can help reduce fraud and chargebacks, but if applied uniformly or too aggressively, they may cause unnecessary declines.

Yuno allows merchants to layer fraud providers and apply custom logic by market, risk level or channel. By combining orchestration with fraud controls, merchants can reduce false declines while keeping conversion high.

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How does localization improve approval rates?

Payments localization isn’t just about accepting the local currency, it’s about adapting to how customers prefer to pay. In LATAM, for example, wallets and installment options are common, while in Asia, success may depend on QR payments or regional schemes.

With payment orchestration, merchants can activate local payment methods across 200+ countries. This improves success rates, avoids currency rejections, and gives customers a familiar, frictionless checkout experience.

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What are three practical ways to improve approval rates today?

1. Implement routing across multiple PSPs: Route based on issuer, geography, and cost-efficiency, rather than a single gateway fallback.
2. Calibrate your fraud setup: Apply intelligent 3DS and tokenization selectively, minimizing unnecessary friction for good customers.

Localize and diversify your methods: Offer the right options in each region and connect to local acquirers for higher acceptance.