The quarterly review is going well until someone from the board asks a simple question. “Our approval rate is 88%. Is that good?”
The payments director knows the number by heart. She knows it went up two points since last year. What she can’t say with confidence is whether 88% puts the company ahead of its peers, behind them, or somewhere in the middle. And she suspects the honest answer is “it depends,” which is rarely what a board wants to hear.
It’s one of the most common questions in payments, and one of the hardest to answer well. Here’s how to approach it.
An approval rate only means something in context. The same number can be excellent in one market and worrying in another.
Card-not-present transactions are a clear example. Visa notes that in certain Latin American countries, about 3 out of 100 card-present transactions are declined, while roughly 2 out of 10 card-not-present transactions are. A business selling mostly online in those markets will naturally see a very different approval rate from one processing mostly in-store payments, even if both are well run.
Industry, ticket size, payment method, issuer mix and the share of cross-border or recurring transactions all move the number too. That’s why comparing your rate to a generic “industry average” can be misleading in either direction.
A single metric rarely tells the full story. Enterprises that understand their performance well usually track a small set of indicators together.
Payment success rate. The share of payment attempts that end in a completed transaction. In the Merchant Risk Council’s 2026 global report, payment success rate and revenue ranked as the top two KPIs among 14 payment metrics evaluated by merchants worldwide.
Authorization rate by segment. The overall rate is useful for trends, but the insight lives in the breakdown: by provider, issuer, BIN, market, payment method and transaction type.
False declines. Legitimate customers turned away by mistake. These are easy to miss because they don’t show up as fraud. The same MRC report found that false positives keep rising even as overall fraud has declined for the second year in a row.
Processing cost. A high approval rate means less if each transaction costs more than it should. Performance is always a balance between acceptance and cost.
Checkout conversion. Some revenue is lost before a payment is ever attempted. Baymard Institute calculates an average documented cart abandonment rate of 70.22%, based on 50 different studies. Not all of that is payment-related, but it’s a reminder that payment performance starts before the authorization request.
Good benchmarking compares like with like. A few principles help:
This last point is where most companies get stuck. Your data only reflects your providers, your customers and your markets. If approval rates with a certain issuer are low, you can’t tell from your own numbers whether every merchant sees the same, or whether there’s an opportunity others have already captured.
That’s why context from across markets and providers matters. It turns “our rate dropped” into “our rate dropped more than it should have, here, and this is the likely reason.”
The next time the question comes up, the best answer isn’t a single number. It’s a clear picture: how performance compares by segment, where it stands against the market, and what’s being done about the gaps.
Getting there takes unified data and context beyond your own operation. That’s what Athia, DEUNA’s AI command center for payments, was built for: combining your payment performance with cross-market and provider intelligence to show where you stand and what to do next. Learn more at deuna.com.
