Payments glossary
Authorisation
Authorisation is the first stage of a card payment: the merchant's payment provider asks the customer's issuing bank to approve the amount. An approval places a hold on the cardholder's funds but moves no money - that happens later, at capture and settlement.
What happens during authorisation
Authorisation is the real-time question at the heart of a card payment: can this card pay this amount? The merchant's gateway sends the request through the acquirer to the card scheme, which routes it to the customer's issuing bank. The issuer checks the card status, available funds and fraud signals - and, for online payments in South Africa, usually a 3-D Secure result - then answers with an approval code or a decline, typically within a second or two.
An authorisation is not money
An approved authorisation places a hold on the cardholder's available balance but moves no funds. The charge only becomes real when the merchant captures it, and money only reaches the merchant at settlement. Holds that are never captured expire after a period set by issuer and scheme rules - commonly a few days for standard purchases - which is why an abandoned "pending" charge on a customer's statement disappears by itself.
Why authorisations decline
Declines split into two families. Hard declines - a stolen card, a closed account - should never be retried. Soft declines - insufficient funds, an issuer timeout, a generic do-not-honour - are temporary, and a considered retry strategy recovers a meaningful share of them. Sending complete transaction data and proper authentication gives issuers fewer reasons to say no; LekkaPay's gateway returns the underlying decline reason on each transaction so merchants can respond intelligently rather than guess.
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