The Impact of “Stop All Recurring” Declines on Subscription Businesses
As issuers and fintechs take control of subscription cancellations, merchants risk losing revenue and retention opportunities—unless they can track and respond to stop_all_recurring declines with real-time payment data.
In a bid to grant customers more control over their digital and subscription services, issuers are starting to leverage services like Visa Stop Payment Service. Through this program, card users can request their issuer—not the merchant—stop Visa from authorizing ongoing subscription or installment payments at will. Similarly, dedicated subscription management companies like Rocket Money and Minna have entered the market to provide consumers and banks with different ways to manage all their subscriptions from a single place. Suddenly, card issuers and consumer fintechs are now at the center of the subscription cancellation experience—not merchants.
The Customer Experience vs Merchant Impact
Traditionally, customers wanting to cancel a subscription service had to contact the associated merchant. They might then fill out a form to indicate the reason behind their cancellation request or even see options for lower tier pricing meant to entice them to stay. New subscription cancellation services instead offer customers the opportunity to cancel ongoing payments directly from a banking website or mobile application.
When customers don’t need to talk to you directly to stop all future payments for subscription products or services, this impedes your ability to combat churn with financial incentives or perks. Additionally, you can’t collect valuable context from the customer about why they're leaving or what could convince them to stick around.
When a customer does cancel via their issuing bank or a platform like Rocket Money, your next attempt to charge the customer can be declined with the reason code stop_all_recurring. This decline will actually block the current billing cycle and all subsequent retry attempts; in many cases, it will also block your customer from signing up again with the same payment method. You can track the number of these declines to measure the overall impact on your business.
Regional Trends in Stop All Recurring Declines (2024)
Looking at Visa card transaction data for a few key regional cohorts of Pagos customers in 2024, we’ve tracked how frequently the stop_all_recurring decline appears as a percentage of all recurring transactions:
While this percentage remains small (less than 1%, but growing), more issuers are starting to implement it in more markets and the trends are striking:
In the Americas and Asia, instances of this decline code surged, with some businesses seeing up to a 3x increase over the course of the year, particularly in the final quarter
In Oceana, we’re not seeing any changes at this point, indicating this new subscription cancellation option hasn’t been adopted yet
What This Means for Your Business
If you’re a subscription-based business, the stop_all_recurring decline code can have any or all of the following impacts on your operations:
Lost opportunities to retain customers – Since cancellations happen outside your flow, you lose the ability to offer retention incentives or request customer feedback on their reason for cancellation
Potentially permanent blocking of cards – Once this decline is triggered, the same card often can’t be used to re-subscribe, even if the customer later changes their mind
Market-specific differences – Depending on where your customers are, you may see vastly different trends, requiring region-specific strategies (this is why deep data dives into individual segments of your business are important)
How Pagos Insights Can Help
Understanding when and where stop_all_recurring declines happen is the first step toward responding effectively. Pagos Insights, our data aggregation and visualization platform, makes it easy to:
Track your stop_all_recurring decline rates over time
Compare trends across different processors, payment methods, and issuing banks
Identify whether a particular region, BIN, or card brand is driving your numbers up
Measure the impact of any adjustments or A/B test you implement in response
With real-time, data-backed insights, you can stay ahead of these trends and take action before they start cutting into your revenue. As with most changes in the payments world, if you’re not vigilant, you won’t know what’s happening or how it’s impacting your business until it’s too late. Only with full data visibility of your entire payments stack—like the kind Pagos provides—can you optimize your response to every regulation change and new technology introduced in the processing sector.
Want to see how stop_all_recurring declines are affecting your business? Get in touch with us today!