Payment Failure Patterns: What ML Found in 50M Transactions

9% of all SaaS payments fail. That is $90K per $1M in ARR walking out the door. But here is what nobody tells you: • 73% of failed payments are recoverable • Standard retry logic only recovers 23% • Smart retries recover 55% • Time of retry matters more than frequency The biggest revelation: Most payment failures are not about money. 41% fail due to technical issues, 31% from card problems, and only 28% from insufficient funds. This changes everything about recovery strategy.

Payment failure rates vary wildly by country: United States: 7.2% failure rate - Primary cause: Expired cards (43%) - Best retry: Day 3 at 10 AM EST - Recovery rate: 61% European Union: 11.3% failure rate - Primary cause: Strong authentication (38%) - Best retry: Immediate with 3DS2 - Recovery rate: 71% Latin America: 18.7% failure rate - Primary cause: Bank connectivity (44%) - Best retry: Day 1 at 2 PM local - Recovery rate: 43% Asia-Pacific: 9.8% failure rate - Primary cause: Cross-border flags (37%) - Best retry: With merchant descriptor update - Recovery rate: 52%

Our payment recovery model analyzes 50+ factors to predict optimal retry strategy: Timing Optimization: - Day of week patterns (Tuesdays 31% better than Mondays) - Payday cycles (15th and 30th show 47% higher success) - Local holidays impact (December 26th has 81% failure rate) Smart Retry Logic: - Insufficient funds: Wait 3-5 days - Expired card: Email immediately, retry in 24h - Do not honor: Never retry (fraud risk) - Technical failure: Retry within 1 hour Preemptive Saves: - Detect expiring cards 30 days early - Identify high-risk transactions before processing - Update payment methods proactively