Telecom Payment Optimisation Case Study Results

A declined top-up, failed direct-debit replacement or interrupted monthly bundle does more than lose one transaction. For a telecom provider, it can trigger customer support contacts, service disruption and a preventable rise in churn. This telecom payment optimisation case study shows how an international mobile services business addressed those risks by treating payment acceptance as a commercial control point rather than a back-office function.

The business sold prepaid credit, recurring mobile plans and digital add-ons across several European markets. Its checkout was technically functional, but payment performance was uneven. Approval rates varied by country, subscription renewals failed more often than the team expected, and fraud rules were catching legitimate customers alongside genuinely risky activity.

The objective was clear: increase successful payments without relaxing risk standards or creating a lengthy rebuild for the product team.

The payment challenge behind declining revenue

The merchant had grown through new territories, local promotions and a wider range of subscription offers. Its payment set-up had not kept pace. One primary processing route handled most card volume, while alternative payment methods were offered inconsistently between markets. When an issuer declined a transaction, there was limited ability to route it intelligently or recover it with a better-timed retry.

This created three connected problems. First, customers using valid cards were being declined for reasons that were not always final, including issuer preferences, temporary insufficient funds and authentication friction. Secondly, recurring payments were treated too much like initial purchases, even though stored credentials, expiry dates and issuer behaviour require a different approach. Thirdly, the fraud configuration used broad controls to protect the business, but those controls raised false positives during promotional peaks.

For telecom businesses, these failures compound quickly. A customer may abandon a one-off top-up, but a failed renewal can affect the relationship with the service itself. The payment team needed better visibility by market, issuer response, card scheme, payment type and decline reason before it could make meaningful improvements.

Telecom payment optimisation case study: the approach

The first step was not to add more payment providers indiscriminately. More connections can create more operational work if routing logic, reporting and settlement processes are not designed around the merchant’s actual payment patterns. Instead, the programme began with transaction-level analysis covering authorisation outcomes, soft and hard declines, 3D Secure results, chargebacks and renewal performance.

The analysis identified that a significant share of failed card payments came from soft declines. These are transactions that may succeed when presented through a different acquiring route, with updated transaction data or at a more suitable time. Hard declines, such as invalid account details or lost cards, required a different response. Retrying them repeatedly would only create cost, customer frustration and a poorer issuer relationship.

The merchant then implemented payment orchestration through a single integration layer. This gave its payment team the ability to direct transactions to selected acquiring partners according to country, card type, currency, transaction value and real-time performance. The infrastructure was configured to retain a primary route while creating controlled fallback options for eligible transactions.

Smarter routing, not random retries

Routing rules focused on authorisation quality rather than simply sending volume to the lowest-cost processor. For example, domestic cards were routed to acquiring partners with stronger local issuer familiarity where appropriate. Cross-border transactions could follow a route better suited to the customer currency and merchant category. The rules were monitored and adjusted as issuer behaviour changed.

A carefully designed retry strategy was applied to recurring payments. Soft declines received limited, spaced retries based on the reason code and the expected customer behaviour. A payment declined for insufficient funds may have a better chance after payday than it does several minutes later. Conversely, hard declines were stopped quickly and moved into a customer communication journey requesting updated payment details.

Network tokenisation and account updater services were also introduced for eligible card portfolios. These tools can reduce avoidable recurring-payment failures when card details change following expiry, replacement or reissue. They are not a substitute for a sound dunning process, but they reduce the number of customers who need to take action at all.

Reducing authentication friction without weakening security

Strong Customer Authentication must be handled carefully in telecom checkout flows. Applying unnecessary challenges can interrupt urgent top-ups and lower conversion. Avoiding authentication where it is required exposes the merchant to compliance and fraud risk.

The solution used 3D Secure v2 with better transaction data and risk-based decisioning. Low-risk, eligible transactions could be assessed for frictionless authentication, while higher-risk activity was challenged when required. Device signals, transaction history, velocity controls and location consistency were used to distinguish normal customer behaviour from suspicious patterns.

Fraud rules were also segmented by product type. A low-value prepaid top-up has a different risk profile from a high-value handset-related order or a newly created subscription. This allowed the merchant to apply tighter controls where fraud exposure justified them, while reducing unnecessary declines for established customers making routine payments.

Results after the optimisation programme

Over the first twelve weeks, the merchant recorded a 6.8 percentage point increase in card authorisation rates across the markets included in the programme. The gain was not identical everywhere. Markets with stronger local acquiring coverage and high soft-decline volumes improved most, while established domestic routes saw more modest movement.

Recurring payment recovery improved by 14% as a result of targeted retries, clearer decline categorisation and token-based card credential updates. This mattered beyond the immediate revenue recovered. Fewer failed renewals meant fewer interrupted services and fewer support queries from customers whose plans had lapsed unexpectedly.

The false-positive rate fell by 22% after fraud controls were separated by transaction type and customer history. Chargeback levels remained within the merchant’s agreed risk threshold, demonstrating the central principle of the programme: higher approval rates only create value when they are achieved without accepting unmanageable fraud.

Operationally, the payment team gained a more useful view of performance. Rather than relying on a blended approval rate, it could assess results by acquirer, issuer, territory, payment method, recurring status and decline category. This made it easier to spot a deteriorating route, test a new rule or decide where an additional local payment method could improve conversion.

AllSecure supported the project with payment orchestration, acquiring access, fraud configuration and technical guidance around recurring billing and 3D Secure v2. A single platform reduced the need for the merchant’s development team to maintain separate integrations for each payment relationship while preserving the flexibility to adapt routing decisions as the business expanded.

What payment leaders should take from this case

The strongest lesson is that payment optimisation is not one change to a checkout page. It is an ongoing discipline combining acquiring strategy, transaction data, authentication design, fraud controls and recovery processes. A payment decline is not always a definitive customer refusal, but it should never be retried without a reason.

Telecom merchants should start by separating the metrics that are often grouped together. Initial-payment approval, recurring-payment recovery, authentication completion, fraud declines and chargebacks need their own reporting. A blended dashboard can hide a serious subscription problem behind healthy prepaid top-up figures.

It also pays to assess whether local payment preferences are reflected in the checkout. Cards may be central to a strategy, yet bank-based methods, digital wallets or regionally preferred options can improve acceptance and trust in specific markets. The right mix depends on the territories served, customer demographics, average transaction value and the type of telecom product being sold.

Finally, do not judge an acquiring route only by headline fees. A lower processing cost can be outweighed by weaker approvals, reduced renewal recovery or limited support when payment performance changes. The more valuable comparison is the net revenue retained after declines, fraud losses, chargebacks and operational effort.

Payment performance is measurable, configurable and worth revisiting as markets, issuer behaviour and customer expectations change. For telecom businesses, every recovered legitimate transaction can protect both revenue and the customer relationship that follows.