Which declines should never be sent to another provider?

Declines that say the card or account cannot be used, such as lost, stolen or closed accounts, invalid card numbers and suspected fraud. Sending them elsewhere does not change the issuer's answer and counts toward scheme retry limits and fees.

Hard declines

Some responses mean the card or account cannot be used, whatever the acquirer: lost or stolen card, closed account, invalid card number, expired card, suspected fraud, pick-up card. The issuer's answer will be the same through any provider. Retrying them elsewhere adds an attempt, a fee, and a mark against the merchant in scheme retry monitoring.

What the schemes watch

• Visa and Mastercard limit the number of retries on a declined card within a period, and charge for excessive reattempts.
• Repeated attempts on fraud declines can be read as card testing.
• Retry patterns feed into issuer risk models, lowering future approvals for the merchant.

What to retry

Technical errors, timeouts, "do not honor" and other soft declines where a different acquirer or a later attempt may succeed, and soft declines asking for authentication, which should be retried with a 3-D Secure challenge. The fallback policy should list decline codes explicitly, by provider, since providers code the same response differently. A platform that normalizes decline codes across providers makes that list maintainable; one that does not leaves each operator to build it by observation.