Why Payment Declines Are a Data Issue, not a Checkout Problem
It is no secret that the checkout process is a vital stage of the sales cycle, and it’s no surprise that most merchants obsess over creating the optimal customer experience.
However, in all this focus on the front end, merchants often neglect the chief purpose of checkout: receiving payment. Overlooking this reality can lead to mounting declines as merchants scale, particularly when they adopt multiple acquirers to support expansion into new geographies and channels.
Because each acquirer may issue different tokens, a single customer can end up associated with multiple credentials—and merchants have no reliable way to recognize this fragmentation. While this creates challenges across the business, the most material impacts are lost revenue and hidden operational costs.
In a PaymentsJournal podcast, Sheena Cherian, Director of Product Management at Worldpay, and Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy and Research, discussed the short-term wins and long-term objectives merchants should consider when building a credential consolidation strategy—one that can transform a complex multi-acquirer setup from an operational burden into a competitive advantage.
Optimizing What You Have
A splintered credential environment can rapidly snowball into broader business impacts, including higher decline rates and increased risk of involuntary churn in recurring revenue models. Multiple tokens also prevent merchants from consistently recognizing the same customer across channels, limiting their ability to effectively attribute loyalty points and rewards.
“You get into these glitchy things like you bought online, you want to return in-store, but you’ve got to present your card again to get the credit because those channels aren’t sharing tokens,” Apgar said. “It impacts performance because you could have the same card represented by multiple tokens, some of which are favorably received by issuers and some of which may be less so.”
These challenges have driven demand for payment optimization, a behind-the-scenes layer designed to maximize authorization rates. At the core of payment optimization is credential management, which ensures the most effective payment credential is used for each transaction.
With the right credential management strategy in place, hidden costs can be converted into incremental revenue gains.
“Even a 1% improvement uplift in your authorization rate can be huge in terms of your savings,” Cherian said. “Take for example a large enterprise merchant who’s doing a billion transactions every year. Even a 1% uplift in that and you’re looking at $10 million in terms of revenue that’s recovered. And all of that without adding any new product capabilities, without spending additional investment in marketing. You’re literally just optimizing what you have.”
Keeping Up with Account Flux
One of the fastest ways to improve authorization rates is by deploying an account updater. Consumer card data is constantly changing due to reissuance, replacements, and expirations. For merchants reliant on subscription or recurring payments models, this volatility presents a significant risk.
Account updaters address this by automatically refreshing card details before transactions are processed, resulting in fewer declines. These automatic updates allow merchants to redirect focus elsewhere, while also delivering substantial revenue gains. Indeed, Worldpay noted that its account updater clients experienced a 9.3% increase in payment acceptance.
While many acquirers offer some form of account updater, their effectiveness varies.
“One thing that we have observed is that merchants will sign up for account updater with an acquirer that they’re already processing with, and what ends up happening is that account updater capability is turned on for the volume for that acquiring relationship. They’re not able to scale it for other acquirers that they may be working with,” Cherian said.
“What do you do?” she said. “You end up going and turning on account updater for every other acquirer that you’re working with, and you’re looking at cost increase right there.”
There are also cases where merchants rely on outdated or inefficient versions of these tools, including batch-based updaters or solutions that require merchant intervention.
Such approaches are unlikely to meet the needs of most enterprise merchants. Instead, these organizations should strongly consider real-time account updater solutions.
“Now, especially in retail and with omnichannel, many merchants have created the ability for customers to store payment credentials as part of their retailer profile,” Apgar said. “If I sign into a retailer account and say, ‘Use my card on file,’ if my card was recently lost or stolen, I may not have gone to the zillions of places where it’s stored and updated them.”
“Any merchant that allows consumers to store payment credentials as part of their user experience should be running real-time account updater with every transaction,” he said.
Scale in a Single Integration
Another key component of a streamlined credential management program is the adoption of network tokens. These tokens are issued by card networks like Visa and Mastercard to replace raw card numbers in transactions.
Unlike acquirer tokens, which are only useable within a single acquirer’s ecosystem, network tokens are portable. This means they can function across providers, reducing lock-in for merchants. In addition, card networks manage credential updates automatically when cards are reissued.
For merchants operating a multi-acquirer strategy, network tokens represent an important step toward addressing credential fragmentation, but they are not a complete solution on their own.
“The problem is oftentimes you tend to turn on a network payment token specifically for the volume or for the acquirer that you’re working with, so it limits you from being able to get the economies of scale to say, ‘I have it in one place, let me use that across all acquiring partners that I have,’” Cherian said.
“The benefit of working with somebody with the kind of scale that we have is that it enables you to integrate once and see all of these card networks and the network tokens and capabilities come alive through that single integration,” she said.
Taking an Agnostic Approach
These competing solutions are driving demand for an agnostic approach to credential management. Unfortunately, many merchants remain tied to vendor-specific systems—and if their token vault belongs to their acquirer, so too does their customer data.
When credentials aren’t portable, switching providers, adding new ones, or even negotiating pricing becomes far more challenging.
“Tokens, by virtue of what they are, can only be detokenized by their creator, so that’s one of the major drawbacks or reasons for not wanting to buy security tokens,” Cherian said. “The Forward API was created to effectively solve for that at its core. What it does is it enables you to have all of your credentials with Worldpay as the vault, but still enables you to work with whoever you’re acquiring with, wherever you’re acquiring.”
For larger merchants operating in a multi-acquirer environment, credential portability is a key component of payments optimization. There are also compliance benefits—consolidating credentials into a single certified vault can reduce security exposure and simplify regulatory obligations.
“It’s a paradigm shift in acquiring because tokenization has always been kind of an add-on service,” Apgar said. “Decoupling the credential management from the actual processing and acquiring and putting credentials as a standalone service gives the merchant the flexibility to adapt to the market to create that unified customer experience across geographies and channels. But there is still the flexibility to optimize authorization rates by choosing paths for those tokens, because the tokens are now agnostic to the path.”
A Single, Secure Hub
Implementing a unified credential management strategy has become imperative, but many merchants are unsure where to begin.
The first step is to map all token environments across the organization and identify how much credential data is siloed within specific acquirers, as well as where authorization inefficiencies occur.
Next, merchants should deploy an account updater, since these solutions can be implemented quickly and deliver immediate improvements in authorization rates.
From there, organizations can move toward credential consolidation, centralizing credentials into single vault, leveraging network tokenization, and implementing broader payment optimization capabilities.
Given the rapidly evolving payments landscape, merchants must also account for emerging trends at every stage. Any infrastructure decision should consider the potential for new payment methods, shifting regulatory frameworks, and, increasingly, the impact of artificial intelligence and the rise of agentic commerce.
Amid these considerations, building a credential management solution from scratch has become impractical for most merchants. This is why cloud-based Vaulting-as-a-Service platforms have emerged—to deliver payment optimization and credential management with security, efficiency, and scalability.
“Credential management at Worldpay is built as an acquirer-agnostic solution that’s distinct and separate from our acquiring platforms and functions,” Cherian said. “It’s a single, secure hub where all of your payment credentials are housed, stored, managed, and synchronized—regardless of where you acquire, who you acquire with, and what channels they originate from.”
