Is the Problem Yours, or Everyone's?

We spend a lot of time talking to senior payments leaders and one question comes up more than any other: how do I know if my numbers are any good? 

This is a reasonable, baseline question. Payments teams report to upper leadership on performance, but the C-suite doesn’t want to know your raw approval rate; they want to know if it’s good, better than before, or top performing when compared to the greater market. If they see a dip, they will ask whether something changed inside your own operations (e.g. a processor update, a routing change, a fraud rule someone added and forgot about), with one of your processors or vendors, or in the wider market.

So where do you find the answers?

The Internet and Your PSPs Can’t Help

One obvious move would be to search "average approval rate" in Google or your favorite AI agent and see how you measure up. That search leads nowhere useful. Depending on who you ask, the average approval rate is somewhere in the 85–95% range, but that range is wide enough to be almost meaningless. Besides, a single blended number hides the details; approval rate varies by geography, payment method, and issuer, and changes greatly depending on whether or not it includes duplicate transaction retries or transactions blocked before ever reaching the processor.

Your PSP can’t answer for you, either. They see a lot of transactions and may offer one-off benchmarks (unlikely), but there are structural limits to what they can tell you:

• Your processor only sees the traffic you send them, which will never include the full picture if you employ multiple PSPs

• Different PSPs may calculate approval rate differently

• A benchmark is only as trustworthy as the party producing it; when the entity grading your performance is also the entity selling you the processing, they’re not incentivized to tell you where you may be falling behind

What a Real Answer Requires

You need a way to determine how your metrics compare to the wider market and whether any changes to your metrics are a result of your own actions, one of your partner’s actions, or something more macroeconomic. To get either, you need data that meets a few conditions:

• Independent - Data produced by a party with no stake in the answer (e.g. doesn't process or route your payments)

• Cross-merchant - Benchmark data drawn from real peers, deduplicated and normalized so you're comparing the same metric calculated the same way

• Segmented - Data broken out by card brand, card type, stored credential, issuer country, and BIN, because "the market" is never one number

• Contextualized - Benchmarking built with the context of what customer segments, data sources, and business dynamics are driving them, because not all transactions are the same, even within a single business

This is what Pagos Benchmarking is built to do.

How Pagos Benchmarking Works

Pagos Benchmarking compares your approval rate against an anonymized cohort of similar businesses, drawn from over $1.5 trillion in ingested payments volume and custom card network data feeds, and refreshed continually so the comparison never goes stale.

On the Approval Rate dashboard inside Pagos Insights, a Benchmark toggle overlays a shaded range showing how your peer cohort is trending over the same period. Filter by card brand, card type, stored credential, or issuer country, and both your data and the benchmark range narrow together. We remove duplicate retries from the cohort data before calculating the benchmark, so pair it with your own deduplication filter for the clearest read.

That answers the question at the portfolio level. BIN Benchmarking answers it BIN by BIN. BIN Benchmark on the Home page of Pagos Insights surfaces lists of BINs that deserve your attention each week. The Below Benchmark list specifically flags the BINs where you're performing furthest below the Pagos network average for that same BIN. Most importantly, these BINs are weighted so your highest-volume, widest-gap BINs rise to the top, meaning a BIN only appears here when your dipped approval rate is hurting your revenue potential.

This information changes the conversation you have with your leadership about your payments performance. "We're running twelve points below where the rest of the market is on this BIN" is a very different opening line than "our approval rate on this BIN is 79%." One is a guess while the other is actionable.

Lastly, we can provide your business with benchmarking where you need it, segmented to mirror the way you break down your own data. The more data you send us, the greater our segmentation capabilities; for example, if you pass a metadata flag for commercial versus consumer products, we can incorporate that in a custom benchmarking file containing the metrics you care about most. Updated every week and available for download or via API, this file acts as input into your analytics workflows or even your report to upper management on where you stand within the market.

Get an Answer You Can Stand Behind

Pagos is independent by design. We don't process payments and we don't route them, so the only thing we care about is making sure you can see the truth in your data in time to take action.

If you're a Pagos customer, reach out to your account manager to access Benchmarking today. If you're not yet, request a demo and we'll show you what your numbers look like next to everyone else's.