Glossary
Approval rate
The approval rate is the share of payment attempts that end approved, counted per terminal, method, country and merchant over a period. It is the first number a payment business manages: a few points of approval are worth more than a few basis points of fee. It falls with cross-border acquiring, with issuers' risk rules, with forced authentication and with provider outages, and it rises with domestic routing, correct BIN data, exemptions and cascading of soft declines.
Counting it honestly
Count attempts, not payers: a payer who tried three cards is three attempts. Separate soft and hard declines, because only the first is the platform’s to fix. Compare the same merchants and amounts before and after a change; a rule that moves large payments to a new acquirer will show a worse rate for reasons that have nothing to do with the acquirer. Watch the trend per terminal, not a single month.
What moves it
Domestic acquiring for domestic cards, a second acquirer for the BIN ranges the first declines, 3-D Secure exemptions where the regulation allows, retries of funds declines on a schedule for subscriptions, bank methods where cards decline, and a cascade that stops at hard declines. The reports per terminal tell which of these worked.
On the platform
Tranzify’s reports show approvals, declines and their reasons per terminal, method, country and merchant, and the share recovered by cascades, from the journal that keeps every attempt.
Updated: 2026-11-08