Introducing BIN Benchmarking: A Weekly Shortlist of the BINs Requiring Your Attention

If you process large-scale transaction volume, you're working with hundreds, if not thousands, of BINs. Every one of them has its own customer profile, average approval rate, and expected fraud risk. They identify where your customers are and provide a general idea of what to expect from them, including how much they typically spend, how reliable they are as long-term, recurring customers, and how likely they are to dispute charges. 

The data contained within BINs is all accessible via Pagos. You can pull approval rate for any BIN, slice it by stored credential, and even compare it across processors with just a few clicks. The hard part isn't getting BIN data anymore, it's knowing which BINs to pay attention to at any given moment. With so many BINs, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Which BIN deserves a closer look this week? Has anything changed week over week? How does your per-BIN performance match up with that of your industry peers?

This need for guidance is universal and deeply relatable. That's why we built BIN Benchmarking, a new widget in beta on the Home page of your Pagos Service Panel that surfaces a new list every week of the BINs most worth your attention.

Catch What's Changed Against Your Own Baseline

The first section of the BIN Benchmark widget is titled Below Your Recent Average. Here you’ll find the top 5 BINs for which your approval rate has dropped the most compared to your performance over the prior three weeks. It answers a simple question: which of my BINs is suddenly performing meaningfully worse than before?

We analyze your per-BIN approval rates using a weighted three-week baseline rather than a single prior week. By using a larger comparison period, we prevent a noisy week from triggering a false alarm, and in giving more weight to recent weeks, we keep your baseline anchored to where you are right now. A BIN only appears here if it saw over 100 transactions in the last week and its approval rate dropped at least five percentage points. If it makes the list, something has genuinely shifted and requires review. 

Click BIN Info to navigate to our in-app BIN lookup tool, pre-populated with all available data fields for that BIN. Alternatively, navigate to Charts where you’ll find a custom data visualization demonstrating that BIN's approval rate over the last four weeks.

You can think of this as your early-warning sign for individual BIN health. Most BIN-level performance problems start small and compound. Spotting a seven-point drop the week it happens is much cheaper than spotting it three weeks in when the slide is baked into your numbers.

See How You Stack Up Against Your Network

The second half of the BIN Benchmark widget—Below Benchmark—answers a question you’ve likely asked before and had no way of answering: how do I compare to other merchants on this BIN? 

Here we surface the top 5 BINs where you’re performing furthest below the Pagos network benchmark for that BIN. For every eligible BIN, broken out by Merchant Initiated Transactions (MIT) and Customer Initiated Transactions (CIT), we compute the average approval rate across all qualifying Pagos merchants; we then multiply your transaction count for a BIN by the gap between your approval rate and the Pagos network benchmark, allowing your highest-volume BINs with the widest gap to rise to the top of the list.

A BIN appears in this list when you're at least five percentage points below the Pagos network benchmark. Armed with this information, you can initiate real conversations with your processor and issuers, your routing logic, and your fraud team about why you’re falling behind your peers. "We're running twelve points below where the rest of the market is on this BIN" is a very different starting point from "our approval rate on this BIN is 79%."

We only surface network benchmark values for BINs with enough qualifying merchants and weekly volume. This ensures these values are accurate and trustworthy for your comparison.

Quick Example

You open Pagos and see a BIN at the top of the Below Your Recent Average list with an approval rate this week of only 79%—down from a recent baseline of 85%. This sudden shift represents a meaningful drop in approved transaction volume. You dig in by navigating directly to a custom approval rate chart, pre-filtered to that BIN. Suddenly you have the full story: the decline started two weeks ago and has gotten steeper.

Below that, in the second list, you spot a different BIN entirely. It's been quietly running ten points under the network average for weeks (67% vs 77%). This implies something is happening on your end specifically to undercut your performance for the BIN in question. 

From here, you can pull the decline code mix to look for trends. A spike in fraud declines might mean you don't actually want these transactions approved, while an increase in soft declines points elsewhere; check whether you're retrying too aggressively, and look at what you're sending in the message itself (e.g. AVS, CVC, descriptor). Any of these can shift how issuers score your requests. Also consider your AOV for the given BIN. If you're processing significantly higher or lower ticket sizes than what the issuer typically sees on this BIN, that alone can explain part of the gap.

Getting Started

BIN Benchmarking is available in beta on the Home page of your Pagos Service Panel. If you’re already a Pagos customer and would like to participate in the closed beta, contact your Account manager today. Not working with Pagos yet? Set up a demo today!