The science of second chances: how auto retries recover revenue

Every merchant has faced sudden bank messages like ‘Do Not Honor’ or ‘Insufficient Funds’. But what you might not know, is that these don’t always mean the money isn't there. Rather, the money isn't there right now.

Picture this: a customer gets paid on Friday and their bank's fraud filter is more aggressive at 3 AM than at 3 PM. The result?  They reject a valid purchase done late on Thursday night.

Add that to the fact that businesses’ retry schedule, ‘Retry in 24 hours. Retry again in 48 hours’, isn’t sufficient and you have a real problem. This brute-force approach not only leads to more declines, but could even get you flagged by card networks.

That’s where auto retries come in.

How do auto retries work?

Auto retries work by predicting the exact moment a failed payment is most likely to succeed. Instead of a static schedule, the system analyses factors like error codes, time of day, and historical payday patterns to schedule the retry. This significantly increases recovery rates for failed transactions.

Worldline’s dual-layer intelligence brings more successful transactions

Our auto retries don’t stop at just timing either. Sometimes when payments don’t work out, the issue is not the card but the payment route. We address this directly with Smart Routing.

With this solution, if a transaction fails, our platform can not only decide when to retry it but where to route it. If one local payment network is experiencing downtime or high decline rates, we can dynamically reroute the retry through a secondary path for a higher chance of success.

As a result, businesses using our Intelligent Recovery tools typically see a double-digit percentage increase in recovered revenue. All from money that would have otherwise been written off as bad debt.

Automatically turn ‘failed’ payments into recovered revenue. Activate Intelligent Retries on the Worldline platform and let our AI recover revenue – even while you sleep.

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