Increase transaction success in SCA regions with automatic soft decline retries

Due to Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements across the European Economic Area (EEA) and UK regions, issuers may decline non-3D Secure (3DS) or frictionless 3DS payments if you present authorization without SCA, or a valid exemption. When this happens, our API will return a 20154 status code.

We recently released Automated Soft Decline retry functionality, letting you automatically retry a soft-declined transaction without building the logic yourself.

If you’ve gone live with Checkout.com after August, we’ll have enabled this feature for you automatically. Otherwise, you should speak to your Customer Success Manager to understand if this feature is right for you, as there may be integration changes involved - we’ll send a 202 payment response after a soft decline with a cardholder redirection to 3DS, in the same way as our 3D Secure API integration.

How it works

Normal flow

Normally, if an issuer in an SCA region rejects an unauthenticated transaction, we would return the transaction with the 20154 response. The only way for you to avoid losing the transaction would be to implement retry logic within your own systems to re-attempt the payment using 3D Secure.

Soft decline retry flow

With soft-decline retries implemented, we’ll automatically upgrade the payment to 3DS and send a 202 payment response with an "upgrade_reason": "sca_retry" field in the 3ds object. The response also contains a 3DS redirection URL to redirect the cardholder for 3DS authentication.

After the cardholder completes authentication, we’ll then send a subsequent authorization request with 3DS data. To retrieve the payment status after authentication, you can use the GET payment details endpoint or subscribe to the payment webhooks.

See our integration guide for more information

If you have any questions about using our soft-decline retry solution, please contact your Customer Success Manager who will be happy to assist you.