Mastercard Working Session on Cardholder-Facing Declines

Issuers are spending a lot of money and resources managing calls into their call centers when an order is declined by a merchant, even though it was never sent to the issuer.

The messages to cardholders from merchants are often generic, such as, “Your order has a problem.” This results in the cardholder contacting their issuer, even though that issuer has no information about the order as they never received the transaction.

This session covers:

• Mastercard’s overview of the problem
• The issuer’s perspective, their associated costs, and the negative impact to customer experience
• Merchants who have implemented response codes effectively
• Challenges from a merchant’s perspective on getting excessively descriptive on decline responses
• Proposed solutions/ideas/strategies