Authorization

The step where the issuer decides whether to approve a payment attempt based on risk, balance, and scheme rules.

When this matters

You are measuring conversion in the payments funnel.
You are designing 3DS/SCA flows that influence issuer trust.
You are troubleshooting sudden drops in approvals.

Operator tips

Separate technical failures from issuer declines in your dashboards.
Track authorization performance by market, method, and merchant segment.
Document how retries, routing, and 3DS decisions affect authorization outcomes.

How to use this term

Use this definition when you are aligning stakeholders across product, engineering, finance, and operations. Shared vocabulary makes it much easier to argue about tradeoffs without talking past each other.

For deeper context, pair this term with the free assessment and providers/methods directories. They give you a concrete view of how concepts show up in real stacks.