The merchant
Multi-billion dollar, global retail brand.*
The issue
The merchant saw a dramatic spike in decline rate over a two month period coming out of Sweden. Typical decline rates for the merchant are between 10-12%, but over two months declines skyrocketed to 36-39%, an over 200% increase in declines, resulting in lost revenue and increased costs.
The solution
Using Pazien as an automated analytics solution, the merchant had visibility into the unusual activity. Alerts from Pazien showed the spike and representatives from the Pazien team helped determine the cause and provided next-step recommendations for the merchant to bring to their provider to remedy the problem and prevent unnecessary declines from doing more damage.
The outcome
PSPs typically don’t surface payment operations issues and things are easily overlooked, especially for large, global merchants. To avoid the problem in the future, the merchant mapped out their key performance indicators (KPIs) with Pazien so they could efficiently stay on top of their payment operations and simplify tasks like tracking dips in authorizations, for example.
If alert-based analytics solutions aren’t a part of your payments operations, internal IT resources can be leveraged to automate reporting and design alerts to identify trends.
With this particular merchant, a specific bank was responsible for the surge in declines. Persistent bank declines can occur for a variety of reasons and are often frustrating as decline reason codes tend to be vague coming from banks. In the case of ongoing declines there are several likely scenarios:
Automate processes
Declines can create a huge blow to business. Not only do declines result in lost revenue and increased costs, but also the potential for loss of customers. Every business aims to optimize authorizations for revenue sake and for a solid customer service experience, so check out your options for keeping on top of declines with minimal effort.
*The name of the merchant is currently protected under a non-disclosure agreement.
Internal systems can be built to manage authorizations, but are often time-intensive and difficult to update along with ever-changing industry regulations. To completely automate analytics with no IT help, try Pazien today.