The one number that quietly decides your revenue.
Your approval rate is the share of good-faith payments that actually clear. Move it a point or two and the result lands straight on the bottom line — no extra ad spend, no new traffic, no redesign. Acquira lifts that number by optimizing every authorization you already send.
A higher line on the same traffic
The flat dashed line is a checkout left to default behaviour. The rising curve is the same store, the same shoppers and the same volume — once each authorization is read, routed and retried with intent. Nothing about your marketing changes; what changes is how many earned sales survive the bank.
- Soft declines recovered. A bank that says "try again" is a maybe, not a no — we win those back at the right moment.
- Authentication kept frictionless. Fewer 3-D Secure step-ups means fewer shoppers lost on the challenge screen.
- Credentials kept fresh. Network tokens replace cards that expired or were reissued before the customer noticed.
- Routing that issuers trust. Each attempt takes the path most likely to be approved, not just the default one.
The work that lifts the rate
Each lever targets a different reason a good payment fails. Together they compound — which is why the curve keeps climbing rather than nudging once.
Smart retries
Recoverable refusals are tried again on a smarter route, at a moment the issuer is likely to say yes — and genuine declines are left alone.
Frictionless 3-D Secure
We send the data issuers need to approve in the background, so SCA clears silently and shoppers rarely meet a challenge screen.
Network tokens
Stored cards are kept current at the network, so an expired or reissued credential keeps clearing without asking the customer to retype it.
Authorization routing
Every attempt is sent down the path most likely to be approved — issuer-aware, acquirer-aware, and chosen from live results rather than a static rule.
What the lift looks like in numbers
Four points is not a rounding error
On a book of payments worth tens of millions, the gap between 86.9% and 91.2% is real money you already earned and were quietly losing at the last step. The recovery sits entirely in payments shoppers intended to make — not in pushing volume or chasing risk.
- Same shoppers, same baskets. The lift comes from approvals you were already entitled to.
- Attributable to the cent. Every recovered payment is tagged, so finance can see exactly what moved.
- No new risk taken on. Genuine declines stay declined; we only chase the refusals that should have cleared.
Questions a finance team will ask
How do you prove the lift is real and not seasonal?
We hold back a control slice of your traffic that runs on default behaviour and compare it, like-for-like, against the optimized stream. The reported lift is the difference between the two over the same window — so seasonality, mix and campaign timing affect both sides equally and cancel out.
What exactly counts as an "approval"?
An authorization the issuer accepts and that settles. We measure on settled approvals, not just initial accepts, so a payment that clears on a smart retry is counted once — at the point it actually succeeds.
Will pushing the rate up cost me in chargebacks?
No. The lift comes from recovering good payments banks wrongly refused, not from forcing risky ones through. Hard declines — suspected fraud, reported cards — are never retried, and we track recovered volume against disputes so you can see the two move independently.
See where your approval rate is leaking.
Bring a slice of your authorization data to a revenue review and we will show you, point by point, where good payments are being lost and what they are worth.