Most merchants think about demand as the constraint on revenue. For many, the real constraint is payments performance. Even when approval rates look healthy, revenue is quietly lost across the payment journey, to avoidable declines, authentication friction and false positives.

The problem is rarely a single leak. Performance varies by market, issuer, channel and payment method, so a global average hides where the money is actually going. According to the 2026 Retail Systems and ACI payments optimization survey of 203 retailers across the US and Europe, half say they are underperforming or cannot assess their own payment performance."

This session cuts through it. A merchant, a PSP and an ACI expert work through three areas where the value sits today: seeing where performance is really lost, the authentication decisions that shape what issuers approve, and the credentials and routing choices that move approvals without driving up cost. Expect practical examples, honest talk about what is hard, and a clear view of what merchants and PSPs should expect from each other.

The challenges merchants and PSPs face

- Approval rates that look healthy but hide losses by market, issuer and method
- Authentication friction and 3DS drop-off turning genuine shoppers away
- Card-on-file and recurring failures that erode subscription revenue
- Retries that add cost without adding revenue
- Fraud controls tuned so tightly they decline good customers
- No clear owner of payment performance, and limited data to see the real problem

Who should attend

Payments and commerce decision makers on the merchant and PSP side: Heads and Directors of Payments, eCommerce and Digital leaders, Product owners for checkout and payments, and Fraud and Risk leads.

Format

A live session: roughly 45 minutes of expert discussion with supporting data, plus 15 minutes of audience Q and A. Light on slides, focused on practical insight you can act on.