Risk Declines KPI

Risk Declines

Risk declines happen when a payment is intentionally blocked because it has been flagged as suspicious by a risk management system—either by the merchant’s fraud detection tools, the payment processor, or the issuing bank. These systems assess various signals and patterns to detect and prevent potentially fraudulent activity.

Such declines may be based on unusual behaviors like mismatched billing information, inconsistent geolocation data, high transaction amounts, or rapid-fire payment attempts. They may also rely on more advanced inputs such as device fingerprinting, machine learning models, or historical fraud indicators.

Unlike issuer declines, which are based on cardholder account status, or gateway declines, which are based on rule-based filters, risk declines are dynamic and often adaptive, making them harder to predict. They aim to strike a balance between preventing fraud and allowing legitimate transactions through.

While effective at minimizing fraud, risk declines can also lead to false positives—legitimate customers being wrongly rejected—which can hurt conversion rates and customer trust. Merchants can reduce risk declines by fine-tuning their risk models, using 3D Secure authentication, and leveraging data enrichment tools that help validate good customers more accurately.