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ON AVERAGE, 3.4 % OF TRANSACTIONS FAIL AND MORE THAN HALF OF THOSE FAILURES ARE NEVER RECOVERED.

£ 100,000 annually due to failed transactions, churn and the administrative burden of managing payment issues. Around 8 % said losses exceeded £ 1 million per year. Crucially, 95 % of SMEs surveyed are now exploring AI-based systems to identify and recover this hidden revenue.

For CXOs, these figures point to a structural issue rather than an operational edge case. Payments have become a core part of the customer experience, and when they fail, the consequences ripple across finance, operations and brand perception.

An ecosystem built for leakage

The modern payments ecosystem is inherently complex. Authorisation failures, chargebacks, refunds, abandoned checkouts and subscription churn are often tracked across multiple teams, platforms and dashboards, creating blind spots that are difficult to reconcile.

Tony Craddock, Director General of The Payments Association, describes the challenge as a series of small failures that add up over time. A modest decline rate might look insignificant in isolation, but across thousands of transactions, it becomes material.

Access PaySuite research shows that, on average, 3.4 % of transactions fail and more than half of those failures are never recovered. Nearly half of SMEs report checkout abandonment rates averaging 7.8 %, while more than one in five say customers actively switch to competitors in search of smoother payment experiences.

Sandra Mianda, Founder and CEO of Paypr. work, argues that the problem is as much cultural as technical.“ Payments have traditionally been treated as a cost centre,” she said.“ KPIs focus on fees and approvals, but declines can happen for many reasons. There’ s a hidden growth opportunity in understanding why payments fail and what can be done about it.”

For SMEs operating across multiple payment service providers, currencies and international markets, the challenge intensifies. Data is siloed across finance, product and customer service teams, limiting visibility and slowing response times.

26 Intelligent SME. tech