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What are Cascading Payments? Overview & Benefits

Blog post from Basis Theory

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Basis Theory
Word Count
787
Company Posts That Month
4
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Post removed?
No
Summary

Cascading payments are a payment-processing approach that reroutes declined transactions through alternative payment service providers, gateways, or channels to give valid payments additional opportunities for approval. Unlike smart routing, which proactively selects the channel most likely to approve a transaction before it is submitted, cascading is a remedial process used after an initial decline and is often incorporated into a broader routing strategy. It can help address declines caused by issuer fraud controls, regional factors, processor outages, or other non-customer-correctable issues, while avoiding retries for errors such as invalid card details that require customer action. Proponents cite improved authorization rates, operational redundancy during provider disruptions, and stronger support for cross-border expansion as key advantages. Implementing cascading requires payment-engine rules for retrying failed transactions through other PSPs, along with access to card data or tokens that can be used across multiple providers, often through an internal cardholder-data environment or a tokenization platform.

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