Why payment success rate is now a fraud metric and revenue depends on It

That shift highlights a critical reality: fraud strategies that over‑block legitimate customers quietly erode revenue, loyalty, and lifetime value. The report shows that false positives continue to rise, even as overall fraud declines for the second consecutive year. This means that merchants aren’t just losing transactions; false declines are costly, reduce conversions, and damage trust. 

Fraud prevention and payment acceptance should no longer be separate operational priorities. Increasingly, they’re being measured together because merchants recognize that every declined transaction carries both risk and revenue consequences.

Why better signals beat more friction

The increasing incidence of fraud has shown merchants that unnecessary friction in the checkout process can suppress legitimate sales just as effectively as a fraud attack. Rather than adding more security controls to checkout ,merchants are prioritizing higher‑quality authorization data. This year’s report shows that nearly 72% of merchants now use at least one form of tokenization and more than 40% use intelligent routing or strong customer authentication to improve approval rates while keeping transactions protected.¹ 

These solutions help issuers to make more accurate real‑time decisions so they can reduce false declines without compromising security. The opportunity lies in using better intelligence—not more complicated checkout steps—to separate legitimate customers from risky activity. Improving the quality of signals available to issuers and fraud systems can help enable more accurate real-time decisions without disrupting legitimate customers.

The revenue risk that’s hiding inside false declines 

When fraud controls overcorrect and reject legitimate customers, the impact is quiet but can be costly. False declines don’t just remove a transaction from the day’s sales total; they can increase support contacts, damage trust and relationships, and reduce customer lifetime value. For merchants and acquirers, that makes approval performance an important risk, customer experience, and growth metric all at the same time. 

Helping protect revenue, not just blocking fraud

Visa Protect helps merchants guard revenue and customer trust through a combination of:

• richer transaction context
• modern authentication
• credential lifecycle intelligence
• AI-driven risk models
• customizable decisioning
• integrated fraud management capabilities

Powered by Visa data and network intelligence, the solution can help reduce false declines, automate more risk decisions, improve authorization performance, and create smoother experiences for legitimate customers. It’s a powerful way for merchants to balance fraud prevention, approval rates, revenue growth, and customer experience across the entire transaction lifecycle.

Let’s talk payments

The 2026 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report provides a deep foundation for understanding why payment success rate is such an important  metric—and how they can reprioritize their fraud strategies to help ensure they’re protecting their revenue.