Checkout.com is committed to sharing information to help you minimize your payment processing costs, which can be helped by managing your decline codes. With this in mind, we’d like to make you aware of the Visa Stop Payment Service (VSPS) fees and share a reminder with you on Visa System Integrity fees.
The VSPS fee is a behavioural fee, charged on the fourth and any following subsequent recurring transactions that have been declined by a stop instruction. The authorization decline response codes used by VSPS signify that the cardholder has withdrawn their consent to take payment from their card and you must not make repeated attempts. A fee of 1 EUR/USD will be applied if you reattempt transactions in this scenario.
Visa System Integrity fees were introduced in 2021, with the intention to reduce fraud and increase approval rates in general. We want to support you in avoiding unexpected charges as a result of these fees and any non-compliance fines, so have shared the information below to help you understand the circumstances in which these fees are applied, and how to avoid them.
If you have any questions about these fees, please reach out to your Checkout.com support team for assistance.
Visa changed their existing decline response codes and grouped them into four categories to make them more useful:
These decline codes mean the issuer will never grant approval of the transaction (e.g. the card is blocked for use or never existed).
You should never reattempt a transaction after receiving a Category 1 response code. If you do, you will be charged a fee. See page 5 of our latest pricing and interchange bulletin for more information.
Please note: If you receive a R0, R1, or R3 response, the Visa Stop Payment Service fee will be charged instead of the System Integrity fee. Checkout.com required additional time to operationalize the billing of this fee, and will start making manual billing adjustments from March 2023. The first adjustment may include fees not yet charged for transactions in Q4 of 2022.
You can read more about the VSPS fee on page 5 of our latest pricing and interchange bulletin.
These decline codes mean the issuer may approve but can’t do so right now (e.g., due to a temporary system outage or lack of funds). The issuer would welcome a further authorization attempt in the future.
You may retry these transactions, subject to Visa’s Declined Transaction Resubmission Requirements, which allow up to 15 reattempts in a 30-day period by a merchant / Card Acceptor Identification Code on the same card / PAN. On the 16th and any subsequent requests, a fee will be charged.
This category of decline codes means the issuer cannot approve based on the details provided. This may be due to an invalid account number or incorrect expiration date.
You may retry these transactions, subject to Visa’s Declined Transaction Resubmission Requirements. You will incur a fee if more than 15 reattempts are made in a 30-day period or if the reattempted transactions contribute to exceeding 25,000 declined transactions per merchant in Category 3 per 30-day period.
Please note: Response code 14 - Invalid account number is included in both Category 1 (Issuer Will Never Approve) and Category 3 (Data Quality). You must not reattempt any transaction using the same account number following a response code 14 decline.
While most declines fall into the above categories, some specialist codes may be used on an ad-hoc basis. However, usage should remain minimal. This category includes all other decline codes, many of which are of a technical nature.
Visa allows retries for these response codes and won’t charge a fee.
Checkout.com expanded our response codes to comply with this mandate and give you more transparency and visibility of the declined transaction reasons returned by issuers and banks. This means you can use the codes to decide whether to reattempt a declined authorization or not.
You can read more about the fees and when they are applied on page 5 of our latest pricing and interchange bulletin.
These fees will only apply on a per transaction basis where clients are non-compliant with the rules.
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