5 ways to improve your payment authorization rates

Last updated: October 2026

Cross-border and international declines are likely leaking revenue from your business. A shopper in another country fills their cart, enters their card, and clicks "Pay", only for their issuing bank to turn the payment away.

Most of those shoppers never try again. If you're figuring out how to increase payment success rates for cross-border transactions, it starts with understanding why these payments fail and what you can actually do about it.

This can result in lost sales and a negative customer experience. According to Baymard Institute’s latest research, 10% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order because their credit card was declined, while 9% have abandoned because the checkout didn’t offer enough payment methods.

This article will break down the main causes of cross-border payment declines and share five ways to increase authorization rates, recover more revenue, and create a smoother checkout experience.

If you want to improve payment performance across markets, talk to the Primer team to see how we can help you optimize routing, authentication, retries, and payment recovery across your stack.

What are payment authorization rates (and why should you improve them?)

An authorization rate is the number of transactions accepted by the issuing bank divided by the number of transactions submitted. This differs from conversion rates, which deal with all the pre-processing actions a customer takes. Authorization rates come into play after the "Pay" button has been clicked.

While each is calculated with different data, authorization rates and conversion rates are closely related and must be tracked to understand the complete customer experience.

Improving your payment authorization rates helps you turn more attempted payments into completed sales. That means you can recover revenue that might otherwise be lost, reduce unnecessary declines, and give your customers a smoother checkout experience.

• Increase your revenue: When more legitimate payments are approved, more customers complete their purchases. Improving your authorization rates can therefore help you capture more revenue from the traffic and demand you already have.
• Improve your customer experience: Payment declines can be frustrating, especially when a customer has sufficient funds and expects their payment to go through. Reducing unnecessary declines helps create a smoother checkout experience and lowers the risk of customers abandoning their purchase or going to a competitor.
• Reduce declines for legitimate customers: Fraud prevention is essential, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of genuine customers. By identifying legitimate transactions more accurately, you can approve more good customers while continuing to focus your fraud controls on higher-risk payments.

Uncovering the cause of payment authorization issues

Before you can improve your authorization rate, you need to understand where payments are failing and why. Start by looking at your payment data across providers, then break it down by factors such as market, issuing bank, currency, card type, and transaction value.

Payment insights tools can make this easier by giving you standardized data and visibility across your payment stack, helping you spot patterns that might otherwise be missed.

Identify what’s driving your declines

Look for segments where authorization rates are noticeably lower than average. For example:

• Market: Higher decline rates in specific countries may point to local payment preferences, regulations, or routing issues.
• Issuing bank: Differences between issuers can help you identify opportunities to improve payment routing.
• Card type: Approval rates by card type can reveal whether your payment options match your customers’ preferences.
• Customer segments: Patterns across customer groups can help you identify where declines are concentrated.
• Transaction amount: Higher- or lower-value payments may perform differently and require different routing or risk rules.

Once you know where declines are happening, you can focus your efforts on the areas most likely to improve your authorization rate.

Understanding soft and hard declines

It’s also important to understand what kind of declines you’re dealing with.

• Soft declines are temporary and may be recoverable through a retry or additional action from your customer. These can include insufficient funds, temporary processor issues, or a generic “Do Not Honor” response.
• Hard declines are permanent and generally require your customer to use a different payment method. They can include invalid or closed accounts, lost or stolen cards, or other situations where the issuer won’t approve the transaction.

Distinguishing between soft and hard declines helps you decide when a payment is worth retrying. While an intelligently timed retry may recover a soft decline, hard declines shouldn’t be retried. Repeatedly retrying them can breach card network rules, incur additional costs, and negatively affect your authorization performance. Instead, prompt your customer to use a different payment method.

What is a good payment authorization rate?

There isn't one authorization rate you should aim for across every market. Cross-border payments typically perform differently from domestic transactions, and approval rates can vary significantly by issuer, card type, currency, and processor.

That's why a blended authorization rate only tells you so much. A strong overall rate can still hide poor performance in a particular country or with a specific issuing bank.

Instead, benchmark your authorization rates by the segments that matter most to your business, such as:

• Domestic vs. cross-border payments: Compare how locally issued cards perform against international ones.
• Market and issuer: Look for countries or issuing banks where approval rates are consistently lower.
• Card type and scheme: Compare performance across debit, credit, commercial cards, Visa, Mastercard, and other schemes.
• Processor and acquiring route: Measure whether certain providers perform better for particular markets or transaction types.

The most useful benchmark is therefore your own performance over time. Track authorization rates within each segment, then measure whether changes to routing, retries, authentication, or fraud rules actually improve them.

5 ways to improve your payment authorization rates

Improving your authorization rate means giving more legitimate payments the best possible chance of being approved. That usually requires looking beyond a single decline reason and optimizing how payments are routed, authenticated, retried, and assessed for risk.

Primer gives you one place to manage these decisions across multiple processors, so you can test and improve your payment strategy without rebuilding your integrations each time.

Here are five ways to improve your authorization rates.

1. Retry recoverable declines intelligently

Not every failed payment is final. Some declines are temporary and may succeed if you retry the transaction at the right time or through a different processor.

For example, a payment might fail because a processor is temporarily unavailable or because the issuer returns a soft decline that can be resolved with another attempt.

The key is to retry selectively.

A strong retry strategy should:

• Identify whether the decline is recoverable
• Decide whether to retry immediately or later
• Route the retry through another processor where appropriate
• Track which retry strategies actually recover revenue

Hard declines, such as invalid or closed accounts, should not simply be retried with the same credentials. Repeatedly submitting payments that cannot succeed can create unnecessary costs and negatively affect payment performance.

How Primer helps: With Fallbacks, you can automatically retry eligible failed payments through another processor using logic you define. This lets you recover more soft declines without treating every failed payment in the same way.

2. Optimize your 3DS strategy

3D Secure can improve payment security and help meet regulatory requirements, but applying the same authentication strategy to every payment can add unnecessary friction.

Instead, tailor when and how you use 3DS based on factors such as transaction risk, issuer requirements, customer location, and transaction value.

For example, you may want to apply authentication to higher-risk transactions while allowing lower-risk payments to proceed without an additional challenge where regulations permit.

The aim is to give issuers the authentication they need without creating unnecessary barriers for legitimate customers.

How Primer helps: Primer 3DS lets you manage authentication independently of your underlying processors. You can use Primer Workflows to control when 3DS is triggered and apply a consistent authentication strategy across multiple PSPs.

If an authenticated payment needs to fall back to another processor, Primer can also reuse the original 3DS authentication result where applicable, helping you avoid asking your customer to authenticate again.

3. Reduce false declines from your fraud rules

Fraud prevention is essential, but overly aggressive risk rules can block legitimate customers alongside fraudulent ones.

False declines often happen when a rule treats one unusual signal as enough to reject a transaction. That might be an unusually large purchase, a mismatch between IP and billing location, or activity from a new device.

Rather than relying on broad rules, analyze which risk signals are actually associated with fraud in your business.

Look at factors such as:

• Customer history
• Device and IP information
• Transaction value
• Card type
• Location
• Previous fraud and chargeback patterns

The goal is to make your fraud strategy more precise so you can stop genuinely risky transactions without unnecessarily declining good customers.

How Primer helps: Primer Workflows lets you use payment and risk signals to determine how different transactions should be handled. You can route, authenticate, or apply other logic based on the risk factors that matter to your business rather than using the same rules for every payment.

4. Send issuers better payment data

Issuing banks make authorization decisions using the information they receive about a payment. Providing complete, accurate, and consistent transaction data can make it easier for an issuer to assess whether a payment is legitimate.

Useful information can include:

• Customer name
• Billing address
• CVV
• Device information
• Browser data
• Other relevant transaction details

That does not mean adding every possible field to checkout. Asking customers for unnecessary information can introduce friction and reduce conversion.

Instead, focus on collecting the information that improves your payment and risk signals without making checkout harder to complete.

For customers whose cards you store, keeping payment credentials current is also important. Outdated card details can cause otherwise legitimate payments to fail.

How Primer helps: Network Tokenization replaces stored card numbers with network-issued credentials that can stay current when a card expires or is reissued, helping reduce avoidable failures caused by outdated payment details.

Primer Observability also provides a consolidated view of authorization performance across your payment stack, so you can see how factors such as issuer, market, card type, processor, and authentication affect approval rates. That helps you identify where better data or different payment logic is most likely to improve performance.

5. Route payments to the best-performing processor

Authorization performance can vary significantly between processors.

One PSP might perform particularly well for a certain issuer, card type, currency, or market, while another performs better for a different segment. Sending every payment through the same processor means you may be leaving approvals on the table.

Analyze your authorization data to understand how different processors perform across factors such as:

• Issuing bank
• Card scheme and type
• Market
• Currency
• Transaction value

You can then build routing rules that send each transaction towards the processor most likely to approve it.

How Primer helps: Primer lets you manage multiple processors through one integration and use Workflows to control how transactions are routed. This gives you the flexibility to optimize routing as performance changes instead of relying on one processor or a static priority order.

How to improve authorization rates for cross-border transactions

The five strategies above apply to any payment setup, but cross-border transactions introduce additional challenges.

When the customer, issuing bank, merchant, and acquirer are spread across different countries, issuers may see additional risk signals. Payment preferences, regulatory requirements, processor performance, and acquiring relationships can also vary significantly from market to market.

If you process a large volume of international payments, there are a few additional areas worth focusing on.

Use local acquiring where it makes sense

Where you have the appropriate local entity and acquiring setup, processing a payment through an acquirer in the customer's market can give the transaction a more domestic profile.

For example, a US-issued card acquired in the US may perform differently from the same card routed through a European acquiring entity.

Local acquiring can therefore be an important lever for businesses with meaningful transaction volume in particular markets.

With Primer, you can connect and manage multiple processors and acquiring relationships through the same infrastructure, then route payments according to the markets and routes that perform best.

Offer payment methods customers use locally

Improving cross-border payment success is not only about increasing card approval rates.

Cards are not the preferred payment method in every market. Customers may expect local wallets, bank transfer methods, or account-to-account payment options instead.

Offering locally relevant payment methods can reduce your dependence on cross-border card authorization altogether and give customers another way to complete their purchase if cards perform poorly in that market.

Primer lets you connect multiple payment methods and providers through one integration, making it easier to expand your payment offering as you enter new markets.

Adapt authentication to local requirements

Authentication requirements differ between regions.

In Europe, for example, Strong Customer Authentication requirements can affect how and when 3DS is applied. Other markets may have different regulatory requirements or different issuer expectations.

Rather than creating one global authentication flow, tailor your approach by market, risk level, and transaction type.

With Primer 3DS and Workflows, you can manage those rules centrally across processors and markets, giving you more control over when authentication is required and when unnecessary friction can be avoided.

Measure cross-border performance separately

Finally, avoid judging international payment performance using only your overall authorization rate.

Break down your data by:

• Domestic vs. cross-border transactions
• Issuer country
• Acquiring country
• Currency
• Processor
• Card type
• Payment method

This helps you identify exactly where international transactions are underperforming and whether changes to routing, acquiring, authentication, or payment methods are actually improving results.

Primer gives you a consolidated view of payment performance across providers, so you can identify weak markets and routes without manually comparing separate PSP dashboards.

For businesses operating internationally, improving authorization rates is ultimately about becoming more local in how you process each payment while still managing your payment stack centrally.

Ready to find out where your cross-border payments are being declined and what you can do about it? 

Talk to the Primer team to see how we can help you build a more resilient payment flow and turn more attempted payments into successful transactions.

Frequently Asked Questions: Improving payment authorization rates for cross-border transactions 

What causes payment authorization failures?

Payment authorization failures usually fall into two categories: soft declines (temporary issues like insufficient funds or processor errors) and hard declines (permanent issues such as incorrect card details or a blocked account). Understanding these categories helps merchants choose the right response, such as retrying soft declines but avoiding retries for hard declines.

How do automatic retries help recover failed transactions?

Automatic retries help recover transactions that fail due to temporary issues. By intelligently analyzing the decline reason and choosing the optimal retry timing or alternate payment provider, merchants can recover lost sales without additional user friction.

Can collecting more customer data at checkout improve payment acceptance?

Yes, providing additional billing and device data helps issuing banks make more informed authorization decisions. However, it's essential to balance data collection with a streamlined checkout experience to avoid hurting conversion rates.

Why does routing payments to specific processors improve success rates?

Different processors perform better with certain banks, markets, or card types. By routing transactions based on historical data — such as region or issuer — merchants can maximize the chance of successful authorizations and reduce decline rates.

Why do cross-border transactions have higher decline rates?

When the shopper, the card, and the acquirer are in different countries, the issuing bank sees a transaction that looks riskier and is more likely to decline it. Currency conversion, unfamiliar merchant descriptors, and stricter fraud screening all add to the risk. Local acquiring, local alternative payment methods (APMs), and well-applied SCA exemptions all help narrow the gap.

What authorization rate should I target?

There's no single number, but strong domestic card authorization rates often sit in the high-80s to mid-90s percent range, while cross-border transactions typically run several percentage points lower. Use these only as general guidance, since the right target varies by market, card type, and issuer. The more useful goal is a steady, measurable lift in your own authorization rate over time.

What's the difference between authorization rate and approval rate?

In everyday use, "authorization rate" and "approval rate" refer to the same thing: the share of submitted transactions the issuing bank approves. Some teams use "approval rate" more loosely to include the overall payment success rate across retries and routing. Whichever term you use, define it consistently so you're comparing like with like over time.