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OPTIMIZE COMMERCE

Payment Optimization Platform for smarter authorizations, better outcomes

Help drive higher approvals

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Navigate payment complexity with confidence 

Every digital payment connects multiple players, systems and decisions. But merchants and acquirers often have limited visibility beyond their own environments, making it difficult to understand why legitimate transactions are declined or where authorization performance could improve. As issuer requirements, decisioning models and market conditions evolve, keeping up with new technologies and understanding why legitimate payments are declined can add even more complexity.

Payment Optimization Platform provides a broader advantage

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What is the Mastercard Payment Optimization Platform?

The Mastercard Payment Optimization Platform helps merchants, acquirers, and payment service providers improve payment performance at critical moments in the authorization journey. The platform evaluates over a trillion combinations of data elements to create the most optimal authorization in near real-time and delivers insights to help increase approvals.

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9-15%

conversion increase shown across early pilot results with payment alerts

Payment intelligence at the right moment

Part of Mastercard Merchant Cloud, the Payment Optimization Platform helps turn payment performance into an opportunity for growth. It uses Mastercard data, services and machine-learning intelligence to improve authorization messages, provide near real-time insight and help boost approvals.

How the Payment Optimization Platform works

The Payment Optimization Platform analyzes eligible transactions and either enhances the authorization request or provides intelligence that can support a more informed retry.

A merchant, acquirer, or payment service provider submits eligible transactions to the Payment Optimization Platform. 
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The platform evaluates transaction attributes, authorization behavior, credential trends, and relevant network activity using data and machine-learning insights.
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Depending on the capability and transaction:

Adaptive authorization enhances authorization requests in near real time using transaction data, processing best practices and Mastercard solutions before issuer decisioning.

Payment alerts help determine timing for a successful payment authorization and notifies the merchant to retry the transaction immediately.
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The transaction is submitted or resubmitted to the issuer, which makes the final authorization decision.
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Explore payment optimization for your business

Optimize payments before and after a decline

The Payment Optimization Platform offers capabilities for distinct authorization challenges. Customers can enroll in the features that fit their payment needs, subject to availability and solution functionality.

Adaptive authorization is designed to improve the quality of an eligible authorization request before it reaches the issuer.



The service:


  • Analyzes current transaction indicators, authorization behavior, and relevant payment attributes in near real time.
  • Enhances the authorization message in line with processing standards and best practices.
  • Can apply relevant Mastercard capabilities, including credential updating, tokenization, or cardholder authentication.
  • Sends the enhanced request to the issuer for decisioning.

Payment alerts are designed to support more informed recovery of eligible declines for merchant-initiated transactions.

Using historical and near real-time network activity, the platform’s model identifies patterns associated with the payment credential. When observed activity aligns with the model’s recommendation, Mastercard can advise that the transaction be immediately retried.

This helps payments teams move away from repeated, fixed-schedule retry attempts and toward more intentional action when authorization conditions may be more favorable.

Which capability fits your payment strategy?

Talk with our team about adaptive authorization, payment alerts and eligibility for your payment environment.

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Get more from every payment

Help improve authorization

Enhance eligible authorization messages and support smarter recovery to help more genuine transactions succeed.

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Turn intelligence into action

Continuously analyze authorization performance to identify optimization opportunities in near real time.

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Simplify payment optimization

Access multiple optimization capabilities through one platform, without building each one independently.

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Enable a smoother payment experience

Reduce unnecessary disruptions and focus recovery efforts on eligible transactions with stronger signals.

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Built for businesses powering digital commerce

Enterprise merchants



Improve authorization performance, recover eligible declined payments, and gain payment insights without relying only on the data visible inside your existing ecosystem.
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Acquirers

 

Extend optimization capabilities to merchants and help enhance authorization requests using Mastercard network intelligence.
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Payment service providers



Add Mastercard powered payment optimization to your offering, without adding to your development roadmap.

Designed to work with your payment environment

Merchants, acquirers and payment service providers can connect to the Payment Optimization Platform through supported integrations while continuing to use their established processes for clearing and settlement. Integration requirements depend on the customer type, existing Mastercard connections and selected capabilities.

For existing Merchant Cloud customers - One connection. More capabilities. Add eligible Payment Optimization capabilities through your existing Mastercard Merchant Cloud connection. Availability and integration requirements vary by feature.

Make every approval count

See how Mastercard can help you enhance eligible authorization requests, support smarter decline recovery and improve payment performance.

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