What is Cascading?
When a transaction is declined by the primary acquirer, cascading automatically retries it on a secondary (and tertiary) acquirer — within milliseconds, invisible to the customer.
When It Works
Cascading is most effective on soft declines — issuer unavailable, do-not-honor, generic decline. Hard declines (fraud, expired card, insufficient funds) should never be retried.
The Lift
Properly tuned cascading recovers 15–30% of declines, depending on geography and card mix. That's revenue you would otherwise lose forever.
How Payomatix Does It
Our routing engine classifies each decline reason in real time and only cascades when the issuer signal suggests a retry will succeed. No customer-side retries, no double charges, no chargebacks.