What is a soft decline in payments?
A soft decline is a card authorization refused for a temporary reason: insufficient funds, issuer unavailable, a velocity limit, or authentication required. The issuer sends a response code such as 51, 91 or 1A, and the merchant may retry later or with the missing data, within Visa and Mastercard reattempt limits.
In detail
A soft decline is a card authorization refused for a temporary reason: insufficient funds, issuer unavailable, a velocity limit, or authentication required. The issuer sends a response code such as 51, 91 or 1A, and the merchant may retry later or with the missing data, within Visa and Mastercard reattempt limits.
Soft and hard decline codes
Every refused authorization returns an ISO 8583 response code chosen by the issuer, and acquirers and gateways map the codes. Soft declines that can be retried later include 51 insufficient funds, 61 exceeds withdrawal amount limit, 65 exceeds withdrawal frequency limit, 91 issuer unavailable, 96 system malfunction and 05 do not honor. Some soft declines need the data fixed first: 54 expired card, 55 incorrect PIN, and 1A additional customer authentication required (Visa). Hard declines, such as 04 pick up card, 41 lost card, 43 stolen card or 46 closed account, must never be retried.
The SCA soft decline
In the EEA and the UK, an issuer can refuse an authorization that arrives without strong customer authentication or with an exemption it rejects. Checkout.com describes this as a decline of non-3DS or frictionless 3DS payments presented without SCA, answered by upgrading the payment to 3-D Secure and resubmitting. The retry here is immediate and needs authentication data, not time.
More detail in our #PayDecoding episode on Soft declines.