Payments Benchmark Assessment

Where's the next opportunity in your payments stack?

Answer a short, anonymous set of questions about your current payment strategy across routing, vaulting, 3DS, and fraud.

You'll receive a personalized report showing where your stack lands across a five-tier benchmark, what's working today, and where there's opportunity to improve auth rates, lower cost, and modernize your architecture.

10 questions

About 3 minutes

Routing

In your primary region, how many processors can a transaction be routed to?

• One
• Two
• Three or more

How do you decide which PSP to route a transaction to?

• Each region uses its own dedicated processor
• We use rules that we maintain internally
• We use an AI model to decide per transaction

How often do you analyze and update your routing rules?

• Annually
• Quarterly
• Monthly or more frequently

If a transaction fails on the first attempt, what happens next?

• No retry
• Our processor handles retry
• We retry through the original processor using rules
• We retry to a different processor using rules
• Dynamic retry based on real-time signals like decline code, issuer, or transaction context

Where do you store payment credentials today? (Select all that apply.)

• With our processor(s)
• With a separate vault provider (non-processor)
• In our own internal vault

How do you keep stored card credentials current?

• My PSP handles it for me
• Customers re-enter credentials when transactions fail
• Real-time and/or Batch Account Updater service

What's your approach to network tokens?

• My PSP handles it for me
• We use them by default whenever they're available
• We apply rules to decide when to use them (e.g., by card brand, BIN range, or transaction value)
• We use AI/ML models to dynamically select NT or PAN on a per-transaction basis
• We don't use network tokens

How do you use 3DS today?

• We're not using 3DS today
• We use 3DS only where regulation requires it
• We use 3DS for risk management (not required by regulation)
• We use 3DS for both compliance and risk management

How do you trigger 3DS?

• My PSP handles it for me
• We use our own rules
• Dynamic 3DS based on risk, customer profile, and issuer signals

When in your payments flow does fraud decisioning happen?

• After authorization (post-auth)
• Before authorization (pre-auth)

Your Personalized Payments Assessment

Results are based on your payment stack and strategy, showing where you land today and where you're leaving revenue on the table.

How scoring works

Your tier reflects how much strategic control your architecture gives you and how intelligently your stack orchestrates each transaction.

• Basic
• Developing
• Established
• Advanced
• Optimized

What comes next

What's next for payment performance:

Help more good customers complete their purchases without requiring tradeoffs between performance, cost, risk, and friction.

The north star

All payments teams are driving toward the same north star — higher authorization rates at optimized cost, without introducing risk or friction to the customer experience. The challenge is doing it in an ecosystem where payment methods, regulations, protocols, and issuer risk models keep shifting.

The foundation

Payments teams have spent the last decade building the tech stack and decision logic to keep up — routing and retry strategies, vault and tokenization architecture, 3DS authentication, fraud and risk decisioning. Optimizing those decisions has historically required an unwieldy mix of processor capabilities, homegrown rules, and rules-based orchestration.

The ceiling

That approach moved the industry forward — more control, more resilience, real gains in authorization performance. But it has a ceiling. When decisions are managed and decided separately, the system can only optimize each lever in isolation — improving one outcome often compromises another.

What's emerging

The future of optimization isn't more systems stitched together — it's a single, reliable source of truth, with decisioning that happens per-transaction. Adapting fraud, authentication, routing, and data-sharing decisions in real-time based on identity, issuer behavior, transaction details, customer profiles, and live performance across the payment ecosystem. This approach is what will drive the next improvements to authorization rates, reduction in processing costs, and enhancement of the customer experience.

This shift translates into measurable gains across the payment flow.

• 1—3% increase in authorization rates
• 75% reduction in bank false declines
• 10% increase in borderline risk approvals

Ready to quantify where your current setup is leaving revenue on the table?