The Premise

In the rapidly evolving world of online payments, reliability is key to building trust and repeat usage. However, with an ever-increasing user base and surging volumes in online payments, are systems built to handle this at scale?

As per a recent study, payment gateway downtime in 2025 has increased significantly, with API outages alone rising by about 60% year-on-year, causing millions in direct and indirect financial losses for merchants.

Businesses cannot afford this anymore and need a resilient framework to withstand volumes and deliver a high success rate.

Payment Failures: Dissecting Patterns & Layers

Before building resilient systems, it is critical to understand the mechanisms driving payment failures in digital transactions. Fail-proofing your payment infrastructure from these mechanisms can add resilience and reliability.

1. Gateway Downtime

There can be periods where a payment gateway may be fully or partially unavailable leading to payment failures. Some of the underlying  reasons for this could be technical glitches, maintenance, server outages and occasionally even security incidents. This can lead to payment failures causing a lot of customer frustration and revenue leakage.

2. Transaction Timeouts

There is typically a set time window within which a payment is designed to go through. Due to user inactivity or network error or server delays, this time window could get exceeded causing a transaction timeout. The transaction is automatically canceled and it needs the user to retry.

3. Static Routing With No Real-time Insights

In this setup, transactions are routed through a fixed, pre-configured path through the same service provider with no real-time context. This makes the setup inadaptable to real-time factors such as provider downtime, performance parameters such as uptime, transaction success rate, fees etc. This is literally setting up payments vulnerable to high failure rates.

4. Absence of Retry Logic

Oftentimes, transactions can fail due to temporary reasons such as network glitches like reset, switching etc. In these scenarios, the system does not apply intelligence and context, failing to reattempt. This leads to payment failures that could have been easily avoided with some logic configured into the system.

Payment Failures: The Downsides

Payment failures have a far-reaching impact on many fronts. It directly impacts the bottomline while also hampering customer experience and loyalty. Here is a look at how.

1.  Poor Customer Experience

The digital-native customer is conditioned to scan-and-pay on-the-go. While the real-world payment experience, in even extremely traditional setups, is getting increasingly easy, the digital world is held to higher standards. A payment failure is not just a source of frustration and anxiety, but a complete roadblock to brand loyalty.

Customers stop trusting brands even after a single payment failure.1 out of 3 customers do not reattempt and abandon their carts after a single bad experience at the payment stage. In addition, the reconciliation process can make this even more frustrating and time-consuming as this is a complete loss of a customer’s entire potential lifetime value.

2.  Revenue Leakage

For every 3 payment failures, you lose 1 customer. This directly hits revenue and loss of lifetime value of the given customer.

In addition, it also adds overheads for support and reconciliation. In a climate where cost of customer acquisition is increasing, this is not favorable for businesses to let this happen.

Making Payments Resilient & Reliable with mobiquity® One

mobiquity® One is a leading AI orchestration platform for payments trusted by global enterprises across multiple industries from banking to retail. Its transformative approach to payments as not a single box solution but an orchestration of a series of steps puts it a cut above the rest. It has proven expertise in increasing payment success rates and is a trusted partner for businesses to route their payments.

1. AI-powered smart routing

mobiquity® One’s AI-based routing ensures that transactions are processed through careful consideration of several key parameters that include uptime, gateway health, historical success rates and reliability scores. This ensures careful and a dynamic selection of service provider and enhances the chances of payment success

2. Real-time Fallback Mechanisms

In case of payment failures due to any of the reasons mentioned above, the system automatically chooses the next best gateway immediately to ensure it is avoided at all costs without the user even knowing that a whole mechanism was put to work in the background for the payment to go through.

3. Performance-based Gateway Selection

Factoring historical performance of a gateway and consistent success rates is a key criteria to prevent payment failures. mobiquity® One is designed to choose gateways based on these healthcheck parameters thereby setting up the user more for success than for failure.

4. Avoiding a Single Point of Failure

Payment gateways operate differently under different conditions such as peak times, geography, scheduled maintenance windows etc. Given how volatile they are, it is always beneficial to have multiple gateways to operate with. mobiquity® One is equipped with out-of-the-box integrations with multiple payment gateways giving its users a wide range of choice, consistently guaranteeing uptime and a seamless payment experience.

5. Context-aware Retry Mechanisms

Payment processes are highly context-based. Hence, a one-size-fits-all approach to orchestrating payments is not the best way to go forward. By building relevant logic into the orchestration, a failed payment is set up to retry within the given time-window. This helps in a great way to reduce failures and initiate manual reattempts.

Business Impact of Improved Reliability with mobiquity® One

A payment orchestration layer ensures fast return on investment and helps businesses unlock many operational benefits that can be measured. Here is a glimpse at some of them:

1.  Confidence to Scale

The tool needs to have a proven track record of reducing payment failures and demonstrate intelligent routing capabilities to boost payment success rates despite high transaction volumes. Guarantee uptime at all times with mobiquity® One’s easy-to-integrate payment gateway API. This empowers businesses with a tremendous amount of confidence to scale and handle large volumes of transactions.

2.  Increased Payment Success Rates

Achieve increased success rates and arrest revenue leakage with mobiquity® One. Businesses are seeing an uptick of 4-7% in their topline by improving payment success rates. This also maximizes the lifetime value of customers and builds brand loyalty.

3.  Improved Customer Trust

By ensuring consistent success in processing transactions without payment failures, businesses tend to build trust with their customers. In today’s competitive landscape trust is a hard-earned commodity that comes with a host of long-term benefits. Earned trust has a rippling network effect and generates positive word of mouth and customer advocacy, which further helps in acquiring new customers.

4.  Reduced Operational Costs

By increasing payment success rates, businesses can reduce long reconciliation cycles and support costs. This reduces the need for setting up elaborate refund procedures and saves hours for teams. This is highly beneficial for businesses as they can save on recurring operational expenditure associated with reconciliation, making them more efficient and profitable.

5.  Reduced Cross-functional Dependency

High failure rates mean more frequent interventions from tech teams for troubleshooting, root cause analysis and rebooting systems. By eliminating payment failures, this dependency can be significantly reduced. This helps in setting up an operationally efficient team.

 

Challenge-Solution Mapping: How mobiquity® One Can Help

Challenge	Solution
Payment failures	i. Address gateway dependencies and outages ii. Reduce revenue leakage iii. Improve lifetime value
Market expansion	i. Improve transaction success rates ii. Expand to new markets with ease with pre-integrations
Customer experience	i. Reduce checkout friction ii. Leverage built-in retry logic & design a seamless payment experienceIii. Boost stickiness and customer loyalty
Operational efficiency	i. Reduce dependency on tech ii. Reduce the need for lengthy support conversations for reconciliation

 

Building Payment Resilience With mobiquity® One: Unique Advantages

Businesses across retail to banking trust mobiquity® One for their payment orchestration for some unique parameters. Here is a glimpse.

1. Built to Scale

The platform has proven its ability to deliver consistently at scale. This reliability is non-negotiable for businesses especially with regards to payment. mobiquity® One’s enterprise-grade scalability and cloud-based architecture is designed to handle scale seamlessly.

2. Modular API-first Design

mobiquity® One is pre-integrated with over 78+ systems, gateways and service providers.This API-first modular design ensures businesses can simply plug and play the orchestration layer with the rest of the tech stack. This reduces engineering effort by leaps and bounds.

3. Real-time Analytics & Insights

mobiquity® One has cutting-edge analytics and capabilities to turn real-time insights into action. Its systems continuously learn from ongoing transactions and are constantly evolving. This optimizes the routing and ensures the most optimized pathways for transactions, also keeping MDRs under check.

4. Built-in Security and Compliance

mobiquity® One centralizes compliance management across multiple payment providers, ensuring consistent adherence to regulations like DPDP. Its tokenization and localised data management capabilities makes it a choice for businesses having to meet heavy compliance requirements. WIth this, they can reduce the risk of violations and simplify audits by automating controls and providing unified reporting.

Ready to transform your payment experience from failure to flow?

We now know how non-negotiable payment success rates are to businesses. To ensure reliability and resilience, leverage Comviva’s mobiquity® One with its powerful enterprise-ready capabilities to achieve the same. With its telco-grade reliability, extensive pre-integrations, enterprise-grade scalability and API-first architecture, businesses can rise above existential worries such as payment failures and focus more on crafting even better user experiences. This gives them a chance to innovate further and gain a competitive advantage.