The Payment Summary view should be the first port of call for any business looking to understand payment trends, offering a simple and concise overview of performance. It will always be produced up to and including the full prior month.
The payment amounts shown are gross amounts and do not include any reversals or chargebacks.
Sales, Transactions & Avg. Transaction Value
The “Sales” tile shows total purchase volume for the full prior month and the current year to date up to the and including the full prior month. Each metric has the variance versus the same month in the prior year, and the same year to date position in the prior year.
Example
If the dashboard were being viewed in early April 2022, then the month view would show the full month of March 2022 vs the full month of March 2021. The YTD date view would show January – March inclusive for 2022, and the “vs last year” would be versus January – March inclusive for 2021.
This logic is repeated the accompanying tiles for “Transactions”, which is a count of transactions processed, and “Avg. Transaction Value”, which is the total value of purchases divided by the total count transactions.
"Transactions” is a count of approved transactions only.
Overall these tiles should be used for a set of key performance indicators for payment processing and an indication of whether your business is growing.
Monthly Scheme and Type Split
The “Monthly Scheme and Type Split” shows, for the full prior month, the distribution of sales volume across the card schemes (currently Visa, Mastercard and "other") and then the debit vs credit card split within that. This can be used to make general inferences about customer type, by showing how your volume is split between Visa and Mastercard.
"Other" refers to card schemes outside of Visa and Mastercard, including networks such as Diners, JCB and CUP. These are aggregated in the dashboard for your convenience, and a detailed breakdown is available in the raw data files that accompany the dashboard outputs.
Authorisation Volumes and Rate
The “Authorisation Volumes and Rate” will always show a rolling 13-month view with three metrics:
- Approved transactions in green.
- Declined transactions in red.
- Authorisation rate (approvals divided by total) as a line, to be read from the right-hand axis of the chart.
This is another key performance indicator and should be reviewed regularly to ensure authorisation rates are within expected ranges and not decreasing, which might indicate higher incidence of fraud, a change in network or issuer processing or other operational issues affecting approvals and therefore revenue.
Monthly Decline Reasons
Finally, the monthly decline reasons in the bottom right is a “doughnut” style chart which shows the top 4 reasons (with all others presented in aggregate) as reported by issuers on the full prior month’s declined transactions, together with the grand total of declines, and then split by Visa, Mastercard and "other" card schemes.
"Other" refers to card schemes outside of Visa and Mastercard, including networks such as Diners, JCB and CUP. These are aggregated in the dashboard for your convenience, and a detailed breakdown is available in the raw data files that accompany the dashboard outputs.
This view can be used by businesses to understand why transactions are not being approved and take action – for example, an uptick in suspected fraud declines might indicate a need for improved customer checks. The top 5 reason codes used by issuers represent over 75% of all decline reasons received by Trust:
- Do Not Honour – The issuer has declined the transaction for a reason that has not been shared with Trust Payments. Typically, this requires the customer to contact their card issuer.
- Insufficient Funds – The issuer has declined the transaction as the customer has insufficient funds or credit line. This requires the customer to contact their card issuer.
- Suspected Fraud – The issuer has declined the transaction as they suspect it may be fraudulent. This requires the customer to contact their card issuer.
- Transaction Not Permitted on Card – The issuer has declined the transaction as the card cannot be used for the type of transaction attempted – for example, some corporate cards may only be used for travel and entertainment expenses, or a credit product may not be used for certain transactions such as debt repayments.
- Unable to Process - The issuer has declined the transaction due to a technical issue on the issuer side. This requires the customer to contact their card issuer.
