Definition
Authorization rate (or approval rate) measures approved transactions divided by total authorization attempts. A one-point improvement on $10 million in volume is $100,000 in recovered revenue, which is why it is the most important payments metric most teams never look at.
Declines fall into hard declines (stolen card, closed account) that should not be retried and soft declines (insufficient funds, issuer timeout, do-not-honor) that often succeed on a retry through a different acquirer, at a different time, or with network tokens instead of PANs.
Example
A subscription business sees 8% of renewals soft-decline. Smart retries timed to payday cycles and routed through a second acquirer recover 55% of them, adding 4.4 points to the authorization rate.
How HL Hunt handles it
HL Hunt routes every authorization across multiple acquirers, uses network tokens and account updater by default, and lets the Recovery Agent tune retry schedules per issuer. Customers see an average lift of 4.2 points after switching.