Glossary
Soft decline
A soft decline is a refusal that does not say the card is bad: the acquirer's risk rule fired, a velocity limit was reached, the provider timed out or was down, the issuer asked for authentication, a currency or BIN was not supported. The same payment may be approved by another provider or a moment later, which is why soft declines are what a cascade retries and what approval-rate work is about.
Typical soft reasons
Do-not-honour without a specific reason, issuer or switch unavailable, timeout, exceeds the acquirer’s limit, transaction not permitted at this terminal, authentication required, unsupported card type or currency, a risk score above the provider’s threshold. The response codes differ by scheme and provider, so a platform maps them to one classification.
What to do with one
Retry on the next terminal of the route group within the schemes’ limits on reattempts; for authentication-required answers, run 3-D Secure and retry once; for limits, let the rule choose a terminal with room; never retry a hard decline. The journal must keep the original reason code so that the classification can be checked and corrected.
On the platform
Tranzify maps each provider’s codes to soft and hard categories in the adapter, cascades soft declines within the attempt caps and shows the reasons per terminal in the reports.
Updated: 2026-11-08