In previous roles, we led payments teams at enterprises and startups, where we built payment recovery processes and optimized billing systems. We experienced firsthand how challenging it is to recover failed payments efficiently.

Many teams we’ve spoken to view failed payments as an unsolvable black box — a cost of doing business. But when a payment fails, it doesn’t just cost immediate revenue; it significantly impacts the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) and customer experience.

Teams are trying to handle it by (1) relying on the basic recovery of their payment provider (like Stripe basic smart recovery); (2) brute forcing or fixed-interval retry strategies, a legacy approach that ultimately reduces retry success rates and increases customer churn (3) sending too many or too few emails to customers (contact your bank..).

One of the biggest challenges is that payment providers, issuing banks, and card networks classify errors into different categories and have their own risk rules, which adds complexity and leads to many errors getting bucketed together, such as ‘Do not honor’.

To address this problem, we built decisioning models that take into account 100’s of datapoints, such as customer and payment metadata as well as internal classifiers of error codes and messages. The models determine the optimal time to retry a payment with current or backup payment methods and when to communicate with a customer. Our communications product coordinates transactional emails/sms with retries ensuring sent at an ideal local time and in the local language. With FlyCode you can recover more payments with (1) fewer payment retries (2) faster average days to recovery (3) less customer communications (4) compliant with the Card networks rules [we partnered with Visa] (5) and coordinate the communications with the retries automatically for each customer. On top of that, solutions like Card Account Updater (CAU) and Network Tokens help to automatically update card details when a new card is activated or an expired one is replaced.

Our 60+ customers range from mid-sized to large businesses. We built apps in Stripe and Shopify https://marketplace.stripe.com/apps/flycode-payments (featured in Stripe’s marketplace). Please let me know if you have more questions or feedback. We’ll do our best to answer them!