Payments and cashier

Payment cascading: retrying through another PSP

Payment cascading (payment failover) is automatically retrying a declined payment through another PSP: the player re-enters nothing, and the cashier tries the next route by itself. Only soft declines, such as a provider outage, are retried, and this lifts the approval rate without new traffic.

Yevhen SychovOctober 2026

How it works

The payment goes to the first PSP according to the routing rules. If it is declined for a soft reason, the cashier sends it on to a second provider, then to a third, without the player doing anything. The player sees one payment and one result.

  • Soft decline: a provider outage or timeout, a generic bank decline with no reason given, a restriction at a particular acquirer. Elsewhere, such a payment may go through.
  • Hard decline: a stolen or blocked card, suspected fraud, incorrect details. It is never retried: card schemes limit retries and charge for excessive ones. Nor will another provider fix a lack of funds on the card.

Cascade rules

The order of providers is set by country, the player's bank, card type and amount: each PSP has its own approval rate for each of these dimensions. For example, large deposits from one bank go first to the provider that processes that bank best. The rules are reviewed against fresh decline statistics.

Formula and example

Approval rate with cascading = (approved by the first PSP + approved after cascading) / attempts x 100%For example, out of 1,000 attempts the first PSP approved 720. Of the 280 declines, 120 were soft, and the second PSP approved 60 of them: the approval rate rose from 72% to 78%.

With an average deposit of €50, that is €3,000 of extra deposits for every 1,000 attempts, with no new traffic.

Common mistakes

  • Retrying every decline. A stolen card will not go through at the second provider either, the card schemes charge for excessive retries, and the merchant's statistics suffer.
  • Not checking the final status. The first provider responded late, and the payment had already gone through at the second: the player has paid twice and goes to the bank for a chargeback. Before a retry, check the status of the first attempt.
  • A cascade with no time limit. The player waits while the payment works its way through three providers, and closes the cashier. Set a timeout, offer another method straight after the last decline, and message a player who has left as you would for an abandoned deposit.
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