Mastercard Launches Payment Optimization to Improve Approval Rates

Mastercard has introduced a service aimed at improving approval rates for merchants.

The Payment Optimization Platform (POP) uses data to make “intelligent decisions about transactions,” the company said in a Monday (Oct. 13) announcement. According to Mastercard, early tests show a 9% to 15% uptick in conversions.

“Mastercard has developed POP—a network-based service leveraging Mastercard data to enrich authorization messages and boost merchant approval rates—with cutting-edge AI capabilities to be integrated shortly after pilot,” the announcement said.

The offering is being rolled out with Adyen, NEOPAY, Tap Payments and Worldpay, who will use the service to deliver “an optimal payment experience, drive service continuity and gain incremental revenue,” the company added.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence and Mastercard has catalogued the troubles merchants face with online checkout.

For example, The Online Merchant Checkout Innovation Report late last year found that 60% of merchants said they’d experienced a  problem related to elements of user experience in online checkout.

“Smooth checkouts are critical to conversion,” PYMNTS wrote. “Merchants are ready to invest in technologies that improve the user experience, but they need to understand the options available and see past obstacles that deter them.”

Among those obstacles are the limits of the scope of merchants’ own data, Mastercard said. The company argues it is “uniquely positioned through its real-time access” to data from billions of transactions. This lets POP determine areas of improvement and identify other issues.

According to Mastercard, POP examines more than a trillion combinations of various data elements to “create the most optimal authorization in near real-time and delivers insights to help increase approvals.”

The company says its models are constantly learning and trained using the latest transaction attributes and authorization trends to “continuously optimize payments,” leading to a “frictionless consumer experience” while fueling incremental conversions for merchants.

In other Mastercard news, PYMNTS spoke recently with Raj Seshadri, the company’s chief commercial payments officer, about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in business payments.

“There’s a continuous evolution and … dynamic disruption in finance that requires CFOs to harness data and AI to make finance more efficient, more effective and substantially more strategic,” Seshadri told PYMNTS during a discussion for the B2B PYMNTS 2025 event, “B2B.AI: The Architecture of Intelligent Money Movement.”

For chief financial officers dealing with market uncertainty, rising interest rates and supply chain complexities, AI is expanding the finance team’s agenda beyond operational control to the use of intelligence across ecosystems.

“Where the traditional playbook was to report what happened last quarter, the emerging mandate is to predict what might happen next, and to act before competitors even recognize the shift,” PYMNTS wrote.