A failed payment is not one event

Soft decline, hard decline, insufficient funds, do-not-honor, and issuer timeout are not the same thing. Treating them as “payment failed” produces involuntary churn you will later call churn.

The failure mode is a collapsed state machine. A subscription product with more than three million users was treating every failed recurring charge as one event. Some of those failures should retry tomorrow. Some should never retry. Some should ask the customer for a new card. The custom retry strategy cut involuntary churn 10%.

The other number on this page is also mine. I led a processor migration for the same product. Approval rose 13.36 points, which was +$600K a month. That is what the migration was for. Not a cleaner dashboard. Not a preferred vendor.

I also built the discount and campaign platform that ran marketing across those three million users. Promos are payment-state problems: they have to be correct on capture, refund, and the next invoice.