How do smart retries improve subscription payments?
They classify each decline, stop on hard declines and cancelled mandates, refresh expired cards through account updaters or network tokens, authenticate when the issuer asks, and schedule insufficient-funds retries around paydays within scheme caps. A platform running one counter per card across merchants, with a modern retry engine, recovers revenue without fees.
In detail
They classify each decline, stop on hard declines and cancelled mandates, refresh expired cards through account updaters or network tokens, authenticate when the issuer asks, and schedule insufficient-funds retries around paydays within scheme caps. A platform running one counter per card across merchants, with a modern retry engine, recovers revenue without fees.
How do smart retries work?
A smart retry engine classifies the decline by response code, Merchant Advice Code and Visa category. It stops on hard declines and on R0, R1 and MAC 21, where the cardholder or the issuer has ended the relationship, and asks for a new payment method. It fixes data before retrying on 54, 14 and MAC 01, by querying the account updater or swapping the PAN for a network token. It schedules the rest: insufficient funds retries around paydays and MAC windows, within the 20-per-30-days and 10-per-24-hours caps per card.
Subscriptions: retries that keep the billing date
Recurring billing is where soft declines concentrate. A retry policy should follow the MAC wait windows, use the Visa Account Updater and its Mastercard equivalent to refresh expired or reissued cards before the next cycle, and prefer network tokens, which issuers update without a query. It must also stop on MAC 21 and R1, because a cancelled mandate retried is a chargeback in waiting.
More detail in our #PayDecoding episode on Soft declines.