When it comes to digital commerce, there’s considerable emphasis placed on optimizing the checkout journey for customers. Typically, teams focus on building awareness and streamlining the later stages of the payment journey — but sometimes they overlook the critical authorization phase. Herein lies the opportunity. When authorization is optimized, it can lead to significantly improved outcomes.



An efficient authorization process can enhance the overall customer experience and reduce the likelihood of abandoned carts or failed transactions. Merchants can increase conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction, and drive revenue growth. A seamless authorization process can also improve trust and confidence among customers, leading to repeat transactions.



For acquirers, improving authorization rates can be a significant challenge. As commerce becomes more sophisticated, acquirers are increasingly evolving their approach to safeguard against fraud, protect their merchants’ ecosystems and prevent false declines. More and more, acquirers are tapping into advanced fraud technology to help their merchants reduce fraud and approve more legitimate transactions.

Advanced algorithms have emerged to help analyze customer data points such as transaction history, location, device information and user behavior patterns in real time. In particular, the implementation of advanced machine learning algorithms is helping to enhance authorization rates by quickly analyzing data from a multitude of sources and detect patterns or anomalies that could indicate fraud.

By continuously learning and adapting to new threats, these solutions can stay ahead of evolving fraud tactics. This helps merchants stay vigilant and minimize false positives, thus reducing the risk of legitimate transactions being declined. And because they proactively screen risky transactions before submitting for network authorization, the overall approval rates get a significant boost.



This is true for solutions such as Transaction Risk Management, powered by Mastercard’s Brighterion AI, which screens and evaluates based upon a real-time artificial intelligence model to help prevent payment fraud.



Transaction Risk Management augments its AI model score with customizable rules and thresholds that can be fine-tuned to suit acquirers’ specific needs and the risk tolerance of a business. This flexibility allows businesses to strike the right balance between maximizing authorization rates and minimizing fraud losses. In fact, it can detect incremental fraud by up to 40% — with minimal impact to the customer experience.