Ask ten payment leaders in the Middle East and Africa whether their approval rates are where they should be, and most will tell you no. Ask the same question in Western Europe, and the answer is usually different. The gap is real. In our experience, it is commonly 10 to 15 percentage points at the blended level. The question is why, and what an ambitious team can do about it.
What “approval rate” actually means
Before comparing yourself to anything, be specific. Is the benchmarked number gross authorization rate, net approval rate, or post-retry approval rate? Is it card-present or card-not-present? Does it include 3DS abandonment as a decline? Is it blended across markets and BIN ranges, or sliced properly? A regional benchmark that averages across all of these is usually unhelpful.
In our work, we hold three numbers separately: gross authorization rate at the PSP, customer-perceived approval rate (gross times 3DS completion times retry success), and recovered-decline rate. The gap between regional and global peers shows up differently in each.
Structural reasons for the gap
1. Issuer fragmentation and behavior
The region has dozens of issuing banks across its core markets, many with bespoke fraud and 3DS configurations. A global PSP's default cascade is tuned for an average that does not match a specific GCC or North African issuer. The result is silent declines that are fixable but rarely identified.
2. 3DS enforcement intensity
CBUAE, SAMA, CBE and BAM each enforce 3DS expectations, but practical implementations differ. Teams that treat 3DS as a compliance checkbox leave two to four points of approval on the table by over-challenging low-risk traffic.
3. Cross-border and currency complexity
A great deal of volume is still cross-border. Gulf residents pay global merchants and African merchants pay international suppliers. FX routing, BIN country mismatch handling and dynamic currency conversion all add decline paths that do not exist in purely domestic flows.
4. Local method gaps
Offering only Visa and Mastercard in Morocco, or ignoring Fawry in Egypt, or not integrating with regional BNPL providers caps your upside and biases your mix toward the transactions most likely to decline.
Operational reasons for the gap
- Routing logic tuned for margin, not success. Many regional merchants still route primarily on cost. Optimal routing is a blended function of expected approval, cost and latency.
- Retry logic that ignores decline semantics. A hard decline should not be retried. A soft decline on a bank-level timeout should, after a wait, on a different cascade. Most in-house retry systems handle neither well.
- Fraud rules calibrated once, never revisited. Fraud patterns in the region shift with seasons, promotions and social events. A rule set that was right last Ramadan is unlikely to be right today.
- No feedback loop with issuers. The best- performing merchants in the region maintain direct lines to issuer risk teams and resolve specific decline patterns weeks faster than peers.
The plan for closing the gap
In an Optimize retainer, we target a 2 to 8 point lift in blended approval rate within 90 days. The sequence typically looks like this:
- Clean baseline. Per-market, per-issuer and per-BIN-range metrics on gross authorization, customer- perceived approval and retry success.
- Issuer-level decline taxonomy. Classify every decline code per issuer into hard, soft, retriable or reroutable. This is hours of work and weeks of value.
- Cascade design. Soft declines cascade to a secondary PSP with different issuer relationships. Hard declines do not. Retry windows are tuned per decline code.
- 3DS exemption strategy. Exempt low-risk traffic where the regulator permits. Target frictionless 3DS rates above 85 percent on eligible cards.
- Method gap closure. Prioritized by expected uplift, not by vendor ease of integration.
- Ongoing monitoring. Dashboards, weekly reviews and feedback loops with issuers.
The gap between regional and global approval rates is not a regional curse. It is a solved problem, but not yet a widely executed one. Teams that treat approval rate as a strategic asset, not a reporting line item, close most of the gap within a year.
Where to start if this sounds familiar
If you are reading this and thinking “that is us,” the highest-leverage next step is a short, structured diagnostic. Two weeks of structured work on your decline data, routing logs and method coverage will typically surface enough quantified uplift to justify a full optimization engagement several times over. That is what our Diagnose pillar is designed to produce.