Why we exist

We built Acquira to win back the sales you already earned.

For most online merchants, more revenue is lost to good payments wrongly refused than to actual fraud. Those false declines hide in plain sight — written off as risk, never counted as the customers they really were. Acquira is the checkout built to find that money and bring it back, at the one moment it can still be recovered: the payment itself.

The story

It started with a number nobody was watching

Our founding team spent years close to online payments — building checkouts, reading authorization logs, sitting with merchants as they reconciled the month. The same pattern kept surfacing: a stack of declined payments quietly filed under fraud, when most were ordinary customers, with valid cards, refused for reasons that had nothing to do with intent to defraud.

Those refusals were treated as a cost of doing business. To us they looked like revenue already earned and then dropped on the floor — demand that had done everything right and still walked away empty-handed. So we set out to build a checkout that treats the approval rate as the number that matters, and recovers the good payments the rest of the industry shrugs off.

11%
Average card decline rate online
a large share of which are good customers refused, not genuine fraud.
7x
False declines vs real fraud
good payments are wrongly refused far more often than fraud actually occurs.
70%
Shoppers who don't come back
after a wrongful decline, most simply abandon — the sale is lost for good.
1
Number we optimise for
the approval rate — every part of Acquira exists to move it.
What guides us

Three principles we refuse to bend

A mission is only as good as the choices it forces. These are the ones we hold to, even when a flashier metric or an easier claim is on the table.

Revenue you can measure

A recovered payment is only real if you can see it. We surface every approval we win back in plain figures — the declines we turned into orders and what they were worth — so the lift is something you can point to, not a story you have to take on faith.

Plain figures Attributable

Approvals without friction

Recovering a payment must never mean punishing the customer who made it. We win back revenue by sending issuers better data and smarter retries — not by piling on checks. Strong authentication should be invisible, and a higher approval rate should make checkout feel easier, not harder.

Invisible auth Customer-first

Honest about the lift

Approval rates depend on your card mix, your countries and your issuers — so we talk in ranges, not miracles. We would rather set an expectation we can beat than a headline we cannot. If a payment was a genuine no, we leave it a no; we only ever go after the ones that should have been yes.

No hype Realistic ranges
What we believe about declines

A few convictions that shape the whole product

01

A false decline is a revenue problem

When a good customer is refused, the loss is not risk avoided — it is a sale erased. We treat declines as a line on the income statement first, and a risk question second.

Revenue, not just risk
02

Strong auth should be invisible

Security and a smooth checkout are not a trade-off. The best authentication is the one the customer never notices — full compliance, with the friction engineered out of the way.

Invisible by design
03

Recovery must be measurable

If we cannot show you the payments we brought back, we have not earned our place. Every recovered approval should be attributable, countable and there in your numbers.

Proven, not promised
04

A genuine no stays a no

Higher approvals can never come at the cost of letting fraud through. We chase only the payments that should have cleared, and respect every real refusal an issuer makes.

Discipline first
Who we work with

Built for the checkouts where every approval counts

Acquira is for online businesses that live and die by their approval rate — where a few points of recovered authorizations change the whole quarter.

High-volume online retail

At scale, a single point of approval rate is a serious sum. For high-volume merchants, the soft declines and needless challenges that slip through a busy checkout add up fast — and recovering them is some of the cleanest revenue there is.

Scale Approval points

Subscriptions & recurring

Recurring billing lives on stored cards, and a stored card that fails silently is churn you never chose. Network tokens that keep credentials fresh and smart retries on soft declines protect the renewals your business is built on.

Recurring Involuntary churn

Digital goods & marketplaces

Instant, cross-border and card-not-present, digital and marketplace payments draw more than their share of cautious declines. Better authorization routing and frictionless authentication keep those checkouts clearing across every market you sell into.

Cross-border Card-not-present

See the revenue your checkout is quietly leaving behind

Book a revenue review and we will look at your declines, your authentication mix and your approval rate — and show you, in your own numbers, how much of it can come back.