In global payments, getting a customer to the checkout is only half the challenge. What happens next—the approval or rejection of that transaction—can make or break your revenue targets. For finance leaders and heads of payments, authorisation rates are a critical metric that signals efficiency, trust, and financial performance.
Authorisation refers to the decision a cardholder's issuing bank makes to approve or decline a transaction. The authorisation rate measures how many attempted payments are successfully authorised. While often conflated with payment acceptance rate, authorisation is only one part of the payment journey. Capture, where funds are secured post-authorisation, completes the transaction.
Card authorisation can fail for many reasons, from outdated card information to incorrect billing details. Pre-authorisation and incremental authorisation allow merchants to verify card validity or adjust the transaction amount after initial approval, especially useful in travel, hospitality and subscription services.
Authorisation may only take milliseconds, but its impact echoes across your entire business. Higher authorisation rates mean more successful transactions, fewer lost sales, and stronger conversion rates.
They also reduce the cost and complexity of handling failed transactions, lighten the load on customer support teams, and improve the overall customer experience.
Reliable approvals support cleaner payment data, faster reconciliation, and steadier cash flow. And perhaps most importantly, they build trust, both with your customers and the issuing banks that assess every transaction.
Many authorisation problems stem from avoidable issues in data handling, system design, or network trust. Recognising these common triggers is the first step toward resolving them:
The consequences of a failed authorisation go beyond the immediate lost sale. According to PYMNTS Intelligence, 47% of retailers say that false declines severely affect customer satisfaction. For small and medium-sized businesses, the operational impact is even greater, with 58% reporting high disruption from these errors.
Declines are rarely random. Whether it's expired card data, incomplete billing information, or weak authentication, the outcome is the same: a lost sale. Each failed authorisation creates friction in the customer experience and costs more to recover than to prevent.
Trends across global payment data suggest rising sensitivity among issuing banks, particularly with cross-border or incomplete transactions. Even a correct card number paired with mismatched postal codes can trigger a decline. Without visibility into issuer logic, businesses are left guessing.
Processing payments through local acquiring channels builds familiarity. The issuing bank recognises the request as domestic, improving trust and increasing the odds of a successful authorisation. Local entities also reduce the number of intermediary hops, shortening timeouts and limiting communication failures.
Local acquiring:
Businesses transitioning to local setups routinely report double-digit improvements in authorisation rates, particularly in markets with regional processing sensitivities.
Customers also abandon transactions when their preferred payment method isn’t available. In those cases, cart abandonment can increase by 4% to 10%, further amplifying revenue loss tied to checkout friction.
Improving authorisation performance takes layered intervention:
Not all merchants feel the impact of acquiring strategy equally. These sectors often see the greatest gains from local models:
In each case, local acquiring builds alignment between the merchant, the payment processor, and the issuer.
Low authorisation rates aren’t a cost of doing business, but rather a fixable inefficiency. By moving toward local acquiring, submitting cleaner payment information, and adopting adaptive routing and fraud practices, businesses can convert more of what they already earn.
The result is fewer failed transactions, stronger conversion rates, and a smoother customer experience. Talk to Antom to see how a local-first strategy can help you recover revenue that should have been yours all along.