Issuer Decline

An Issuer Decline occurs when the cardholder's issuing bank refuses to authorize a transaction. Unlike gateway errors or network timeouts, issuer declines represent a definitive decision by the bank.

Issuer declines are categorized as "hard" (permanent, e.g., stolen card) or "soft" (temporary, e.g., insufficient funds). Smart retry logic should only attempt to recover soft declines, as retrying hard declines wastes processing resources and can trigger risk flags with the network.