How to Increase My Payment Approval Rate

Improving your payment approval rate can unlock significant revenue potential. For enterprise businesses processing thousands (or millions) of transactions, even a small increase in approval rates translates into millions in recovered revenue. In this guide, we explore how payment orchestration, smart routing, and other strategies can help you reduce declines and optimize your payment stack.

What is a payment approval rate and why does it matter?

Your payment approval rate, also known as your payment authorization rate, is the percentage of attempted transactions that are successfully authorized by the issuer or acquiring bank. A low approval rate means more failed payments, cart abandonment, and ultimately, lost revenue.

This KPI is especially critical for global merchants operating across regions with different acquiring banks, currencies, and payment behaviors. Optimizing approval rates isn’t just a technical exercise—it’s a strategic growth lever.

‍

What are the most common reasons for payment declines?

There are many reasons why a transaction might be declined:

• Insufficient funds or card limits imposed on the purchaser
  
• Fraud suspicion (which may include false positives)
  
• Cross-border transactions flagged by banks
  
• Processor or acquirer downtime
  
• Incorrect payment information
  
• Authentication failures (3DS, PSD2)
  
  

Understanding these root causes is key to solving them. Many of them are avoidable with the right orchestration layer in place.

How does smart routing increase payment approval rates?

Smart routing dynamically selects the best payment processor or acquirer for each transaction based on factors like region, payment method, issuer bank, and historical success rates.

By analyzing real-time and historical performance, smart routing ensures each transaction is sent through the provider most likely to approve it. Platforms like Yuno allow merchants to create routing rules that adapt to latency, cost, and authorization metrics in real time.

For example, if one acquirer starts declining a certain BIN or currency, Yuno can instantly re-route to an alternative provider with higher success in that context—without any manual intervention.

What role does redundancy play in approval optimization?

Redundancy refers to the ability to process payments through multiple acquirers or gateways. Instead of relying on a single provider, payment orchestration enables failover options when something goes wrong. This not only prevents downtime but also improves approval rates by routing retries to alternative providers after a first attempt fails.

Yuno offers real-time monitoring of anomalies in approval rate and can automatically trigger fallback flows to maximize authorization without impacting the user experience.

How can local payment methods and acquiring help?

One major reason for payment declines in cross-border commerce is the use of foreign or unfamiliar acquiring banks. Using local acquiring improves trust, reduces fraud suspicion, and avoids cross-border fees that lead to declines.

Similarly, offering local payment methods (e.g., Pix in Brazil, UPI in India) increases the likelihood of approval because they are optimized for the region’s infrastructure and consumer behavior.

Yuno supports over 1,000 local and global payment methods, allowing merchants to easily localize checkout experiences in new markets and improve regional approval rates.

How do data and analytics support better approval rates?

Access to unified, real-time transaction data enables merchants to:

• Identify patterns in decline reasons
  
• Monitor approval rate by provider, BIN, geography
  
• Test and optimize routing strategies
  
  

Yuno’s dashboard centralizes all payment activity in one place, with detailed insights and recommendations to help merchants continuously optimize their payment stack.

What is the impact of 3DS and fraud tools on authorization?

While fraud prevention is essential, poorly configured 3DS flows or overly strict risk engines can hurt your approval rate by falsely declining legitimate transactions.

Yuno offers:

• Configurable 3DS workflows (optional vs. mandatory)
  
• Integration with multiple anti-fraud providers
  
• Smart 3DS application only when risk signals justify it
  
  

This approach reduces unnecessary friction while maintaining security.

What are the business outcomes of increasing approval rates?

Even a 1% increase in approval rate can lead to:

• Millions in recovered revenue (for high-volume merchants)
  
• Higher conversion rates
  
• Lower customer service tickets related to failed payments
  
• Better customer experience and repeat purchase rates

Let’s say you're an e-commerce business with:

• 100,000 monthly checkout attempts
  
• Average order value (AOV): $50
  
  
  

✅ Scenario A: 90% Approval Rate

• Approved transactions: 90,000
  
• Revenue = 90,000 × $50 = $4.5 million
  
  

❌ Scenario B: 75% Approval Rate

• Approved transactions: 75,000
  
• Revenue = 75,000 × $50 = $3.75 million
  
  

That’s $750,000 in lost revenue every month—or $9 million annually—due to a lower approval rate.

Mobility platform inDrive achieved a 90% approval rate and a 4.5% uplift in volume after implementing Yuno’s Smart Routing engine.

‍