Mastercard Stand-in Authorization

Make every payment safe and reliable

People chatting and walking down office stairs

When every payment just works, people trust you more

By providing timely and accurate on-behalf decisioning of authorization requests, Stand-In Authorization works to ensure your cardholders can transact safely and reliably at all times.

Woman on phone walking outside with backpack on

Stand-In Authorization

Our Stand-In Authorization service ensures a seamless consumer experience even when your systems are down. And with three new features, you can take even greater control over how payment decisions are made on your behalf.

Dynamic decisioning
Account balance listing
Contingency manager

More accurate decisions with Dynamic Decisioning

Dynamic Decisioning’s AI considers over 200 variables to make intelligent decisions on your behalf during Stand-In — improving decision accuracy.

Peace of mind with Account Balance Listing

Account Balance Listing enables you to share PAN-level spend limits to boost the accuracy of Stand-In decisions and mitigate over limit concerns.

Plan for every risk with Contingency Manager

Contingency Manager allows you to set up customized Stand-In parameters to handle both predictable disruptions (like scheduled maintenance) and unpredictable ones (like cyberattacks).

Someone adjusting wires of a large mainframe

Good for you. Good for cardholders.

Give cardholders a seamless experience and protect your reputation with timely and accurate authorization decisions.

Secure payments ecosystem

Protecting you and your customers

Accurate decisions

Getting it right every time

Always-on payments

Authorization decisions you can depend on

Stand-in Authorization resources

Act now or pay later: Payment resiliency podcast

Is your payments network risk-ready?

In this episode of “Act now or pay later!”, Mastercard’s Payment resiliency podcast, learn about the crucial need for issuers to proactively protect their payments ecosystem in today’s constantly evolving and increasingly complex environment, and why it can’t be either a “We’ll get to it tomorrow” or “We can take care of it ourselves” scenario.

Listen now

What are you looking for?

Featured Content

Mastercard launches Merchant Cloud to simplify and support commerce growth in global acceptance ecosystem

Mastercard Economics Institute unveils its Economic Outlook 2026 report