Approval rate: the share of payments that go through

Formula and example

Calculate it two ways: by attempts and by players. One player can try three times, and the approval rate by attempts comes out lower. For revenue, what matters more is the share of players who wanted to pay and in the end did.

Approval rate hits the first deposit hardest. For example, 1,000 new players a month try to make a first deposit: at a 70% approval rate that is 700 FTDs, at 80% it is already 800. That is 100 more players with no extra spend on traffic.

How to break it down

An average approval rate hides problems. Look at it by dimension:

• Payment method: cards, bank transfers, e-wallets, local methods.
• Bank and card type: debit or credit, standard or premium. Some banks decline gambling payments as a matter of policy.
• Country and currency: a payment in the player's currency and through local acquiring usually goes through better.
• PSP and decline reason: insufficient funds, bank decline, provider outage, failed 3-D Secure authentication.

How to raise it

• Routing and cascading: the payment goes to the PSP with the best approval rate for that bank and country, and after a technical decline it automatically moves on to another one.
• Smart retries: a decline on a stolen or closed card is never retried. Card schemes limit the number of retries and charge for excessive ones.
• Another method straight away: after a decline, the cashier offers an alternative, not just an error message. If the player has left, it is an abandoned deposit: send a message with another method within half an hour.

Common mistakes

• Watching a single average approval rate. A good average can hide a bank or country where fewer than half of payments go through.
• Blaming the PSP for everything. Routing does not fix a lack of funds on the card. Separate player, bank and provider declines.
• Masking the payment category. Processing gambling under someone else's merchant category code breaks card scheme rules and puts your processing at risk.