Glossary
Soft decline
A decline that may succeed if the payment is retried, possibly with changes.
Soft declines include temporary issuer unavailability, a request for authentication or suspected fraud that further data can resolve. Hard declines, such as a closed account, will not succeed on retry.
Distinguishing between the two avoids wasted retries, which issuers may treat as suspicious, and recovers payments that would otherwise be lost.