Businesses can no longer afford to treat payments as an afterthought. Payment optimization is a necessity, impacting everything from approval rates and fraud prevention to customer experience and revenue growth. At Corepay, a well-optimized payment strategy minimizes costs while maximizing revenue.
Why Payment Optimization Matters
Payment optimization focuses on three key objectives:
- Maximizing approval rates – ensuring that every legitimate transaction goes through smoothly.
- Reducing fraud – implementing intelligent security measures without adding unnecessary friction.
- Enhancing customer experience – providing seamless and secure payment processes that build trust and loyalty.
A 1% increase in successful transactions can directly impact revenue. Fine-tuning payment strategies unlocks financial benefits beyond cost savings—improving customer retention and competitive strength.
Payment Optimization Made Simple
At Corepay, we value our clients success and have been helping businesses scale with our payment optimization for many years. We have provided an infographic below to present our strategy for payment optimization.
How Corepay Optimizes Payments for Businesses
At Corepay, we go beyond payment processing—we help businesses strategically optimize their payment stack to drive measurable growth. Our suite of payment optimization tools includes:

- Adaptive Acceptance – intelligently refines authorization flow by factoring in card type, region, and device to boost approval rates.
- Account Updater – ensures recurring payments continue seamlessly by automatically updating expired or replaced card details.
- Network Tokens – enhances security while reducing fraud and boosting approval rates.
- Smart Routing – directs transactions through the most cost-efficient and high-performing processors.
- AI-powered fraud prevention Through CB-Alert – continuously learns and adapts to emerging fraud patterns.
Key Areas of Payment Optimization
1. Optimizing for Conversion
The checkout process determines whether a customer completes a purchase or abandons their cart. A smooth checkout should be tailored to the customer’s location, preferred payment method, and currency.
For example, offering iDEAL in the Netherlands or Alipay in China can significantly improve conversion rates. Businesses should use dynamic checkout solutions that customize real-time payment options based on user behavior.
Additionally, A/B testing different checkout layouts and analyzing cart abandonment data can provide insights into what works best for different customer segments.
2. Optimizing for Authentication
Security regulations like Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) have made authentication essential. While 3D Secure (3DS) improves security, it can introduce friction that leads to cart abandonment. Adaptive 3DS, which selectively applies authentication based on risk assessment, allows businesses to balance security with a smooth experience.
By leveraging machine learning, businesses can apply for exemptions when appropriate, allowing low-risk transactions to proceed without additional steps while subjecting high-risk ones to stricter security.
3. Optimizing for Authorization
Just because a customer presses “pay” doesn’t mean the transaction will be successful. Authorization failures can result from processor outages, issuing bank declines, or expired cards.
To mitigate these risks, businesses should:
- Implement fallback payment processors to reroute transactions in case of PSP downtime.
- Use intelligent transaction retries, which analyze decline reasons and attempt to recover failed transactions.
- Leverage network tokens to replace sensitive card data with secure tokens that stay updated, reducing declines due to expired credentials.
- Analyze issuer response codes to identify recurring decline patterns and adjust payment strategies accordingly.
4. Optimizing for Cost
For businesses processing large volumes of transactions, even minor reductions in payment costs can lead to significant savings. Strategies include:
- Dynamic payment routing, which directs transactions through the most cost-effective processors.
- Meeting volume thresholds to negotiate better rates with PSPs.
- Fraud prevention tools to minimize chargebacks and avoid unnecessary fees.
- Reducing cross-border transaction fees by utilizing local acquiring partners when expanding internationally.
Leveraging Data for Smarter Payments
One major challenge businesses face is lack of visibility into payment performance. Without clear insights, optimizing payments becomes a guessing game. At Corepay, we provide granular transaction data, fraud analysis, and performance benchmarking tools to help businesses make data-driven decisions.
Businesses should track key payment KPIs, including approval rates by region, fraud-to-sales ratios, and chargeback rates, to ensure their payment strategy is delivering measurable improvements.
Learn more about payment orchestration here.
Fighting Fraud While Minimizing False Declines
Security is essential, but overly aggressive fraud filters can wrongly reject legitimate transactions—a problem that cost businesses over $50 billion in false declines in 2023 alone. The key is to deploy adaptive fraud prevention that differentiates between real fraud and genuine customers.
At Corepay, we offer a combination of:
- Machine learning-based fraud detection to identify patterns in fraudulent activity.
- Customizable fraud rules tailored to different business models and risk levels.
- Full anti-chargeback suite: At Corepay, we provide our clients with our full anti-chargeback suite, which consists of chargeback prevention services, Ethoca alerts, and Visa RDR.
- Real-time risk scoring to ensure only high-risk transactions undergo additional verification steps.
Aligning with Issuer Preferences for Higher Authorization Rates
Each issuing bank has its own risk strategy and preferences for processing payments. For example, while network tokensimprove authorization rates in many regions, some issuers in markets like China and the UAE have yet to adopt them widely. Sending a network token to an unsupported issuer could lead to a decline.
A smart PSP (Payment Service Provider), like us at Corepay, dynamically adjust payment routing and data formatting to align with issuer-specific preferences, improving transaction approvals.
Unlocking Your Payment Potential with Corepay
Payments are no longer just a backend process; they are a growth driver. Whether you are looking to increase approval rates, reduce fraud, or optimize costs, Corepay provides the intelligent solutions needed to transform payments from a cost center into a competitive advantage.
Businesses that integrate payment optimization into their core strategy can see significant gains in revenue, lower fraud costs, and stronger customer loyalty.