Unlock the fastest revenue win in your payments stack. Lift prepaid cards approvals.
Prepaid cards are often approved 30 to 40 percentage points less often than credit cards. That makes them one of the quickest revenue wins in your payments stack. Chargebee Reveal, the payments intelligence platform, shows how often payments succeed for each type of card (credit, debit or prepaid) across all your payment gateways. It tells you why the failed payments were declined and points you to the fixes that will recover the maximum revenue.
How do you improve prepaid card approval rates? Look at prepaid on its own, then match each decline code to a fix. Retry insufficient_funds around payday, offer a backup card for card_restrictions and do_not_honor, and send prepaid traffic to your best-performing gateway.
Prepaid/debit instruments underperform credit cards, indicating higher funding failures. Estimated lost revenue: $1,510,048.
Impact $1,510,048Recommendation Consider whether prepaid cards should be accepted at checkout. If accepted, implement a backup payment method prompt for prepaid card users to reduce involuntary churn.
12 card issuers below your average, ~12.99% of invoices, ~$216,600 at-risk volume.
Know exactly which prepaid declines to reroute, retry or replace
A gateway dashboard can tell you a prepaid card was declined. It can't tell you whether your prepaid decline rate is 2x higher than credit, which error code is driving it, or whether one gateway handles prepaid significantly better than another. The cross-stack picture exists only when the data is unified. In 15 minutes, see your prepaid approval rate across every gateway, the decline codes behind it, and the gateway, market and issuer where prepaid performs best.
Filter your auth rate and decline rate by Funding Type. Credit at 84%, prepaid at 46% is the kind of gap that stays invisible inside a blended metric.
Prepaid failures cluster around specific errors: insufficient_funds, do_not_honor, card_restrictions_authorization_failed. Each one points to a different fix.
An insufficient_funds failure calls for a retry nudge or balance top-up prompt. A card_restrictions failure means the card fundamentally won't support recurring billing. Same label, completely different fix.
What you'll need
If Chargebee Reveal is already live on your stack, jump to Step 3. If not, the first two steps get you there.
Read-only credentials for each gateway you process on. Reveal supports Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, and more.
Reveal pulls roughly six months of transaction history per connected gateway. Full ingestion typically completes within a day before funding-type breakdowns are available.
Whether you currently accept all card types, restrict any, or have a backup payment method prompt in place. Helps you know what changes are already live vs what this recipe might surface as a gap.
Go from a blended auth rate to a clear action plan to lift prepaid approval rates
Two setup steps, four analysis steps. You'll start in the Insights view to see the dollar cost of the prepaid problem, then move into Performance to measure the gap and find the specific errors and segments behind it.
Bring all your cross-gateway data into one view
Go to Sources in the left navigation. Add each processor you run with a read-only API key. No engineering, no write access. The same connection covers transaction data, settlement data, and the funding-type breakdowns you'll use in Steps 4 and 5.
- Add each gateway from
Sources › Add Source - Connect every gateway you process on: the cross-gateway funding-type split is the whole point
- Step-by-step guides: Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, and more
Visualize your payment history
Once gateways are connected, Reveal starts ingesting roughly six months of transaction history per gateway. Full ingestion takes around 24 hours. Nothing to do on your end, but wait until the Insights view is live before running the analysis. Funding-type breakdowns are only meaningful once the full history is loaded.
- Transaction data populates per gateway as it's processed
- Insights, Performance, and the Filter Panel unlock as data is ready
- The Payment Method insight category, your Step 3 starting point, appears once population is complete
See what prepaid card failures are costing you
Open Insights and scroll to the Payment Method block, or click the jump-to link at the top of the page. Reveal surfaces the specific payment method insights it found in your data: Prepaid cards, Neo Bank Performance, Issuer Auth Underperformance are the most common. Each carries a dollar impact and a recoverable amount.
- Read the total Payment Method impact to understand the scale
- Find the Prepaid cards insight card and note the dollar impact and effort tag
- Read the Recommendation row below the card. It states the next action directly
- A High Effort tag here means the fix lives in your checkout or routing logic, not in a retry config
Prepaid/debit instruments underperform credit cards, indicating higher funding failures and potentially lower-intent customer segments. Est. lost revenue for the current year: $1,510,048.
Fintech/challenger-issued cards underperforming vs high-intent cohort. Est. lost revenue: $2,491,840.
Impact $2,491,840Measure how far prepaid falls behind your other payment methods
Go to Performance in the left navigation, open the Auth Rate tab, and click Filter Panel in the top right. Under Breakdown, select Funding Type. The auth rate and per-currency stats now split by credit/debit vs prepaid. This is the gap the Insights dollar figure was summarizing. Now you can see it by currency, by attempt count, and by volume.
- Compare Attempt Success % for credit vs prepaid across the same time window
- Check Invoice Success % as well. The per-invoice recovery gap is often wider than the per-attempt gap
- Scroll to the currency breakdown to find which markets are worst-affected
- Switch to the Decline Rate tab with the same filter to see the reverse view
38.4k transactions
$14.8M volume
8.6k transactions
$1.5M volume
Find the specific errors driving prepaid failures
Still in Performance, click Error Distribution. Open the Filter Panel again and apply Funding Type: Prepaid/Debit. The error donut and per-currency tables now show only prepaid transaction failures. The distribution looks different here than the blended view: insufficient_funds is typically dominant (balance doesn't cover the charge), but do_not_honor and card_restrictions_authorization_failed are much larger relative shares than they are for credit. Those two error codes are what distinguishes a retry opportunity from a card-type gate decision.
insufficient_funds: card has insufficient balance. Retry on the next billing cycle. Consider a dunning prompt asking the customer to top up.do_not_honor: the issuer blocked the charge. Often a recurring-billing restriction on the prepaid card. Retry is unlikely to work.card_restrictions_authorization_failed: the card type doesn't support recurring billing. Prompting for a backup method is the right move here.
card_restrictions_authorization_failed makes up more than 15% of your prepaid error volume, adding a backup payment method prompt at checkout is likely a higher-return fix than any retry improvement. Those cards will keep failing on retry. They're not funded-balance problems, they're eligibility problems. Trace the problem to a gateway, region, or card issuer
With Funding Type still applied, stack a second breakdown: Gateway Account to see which processor handles prepaid best, Issuing Country to see if failures concentrate in specific markets, or Card Issuer to identify whether one issuer is responsible for the bulk of the do_not_honor volume. The answer determines whether you fix this at the routing level, the checkout level, or through a targeted dunning change for a specific geography.
- Gateway Account breakdown: if one gateway has 2x the prepaid auth rate of another, route prepaid traffic there first
- Issuing Country breakdown: concentrated failures in one market usually indicate a regional acquiring or local card network issue
- Card Issuer breakdown: a specific issuer driving outsized
do_not_honorvolume is a routing or exclusion conversation, not a retry fix
best prepaid gateway
route away for prepaid
Credit vs prepaid, on the same metrics
These are the kind of numbers and patterns Reveal surfaces when you apply the 'Funding Type' filter. The gap varies by stack, by market, and by the prepaid cards you accept, but the pattern is consistent: prepaid underperforms, the reasons differ by error code, and a blended average hides all of it.
Attempt success rate · blended cross-gateway
Attempt success rate · blended cross-gateway
Four fixes for prepaid card failures
The right fix depends on which error codes are driving the failures and where they're concentrated. Run Steps 4, 5, and 6 before picking one. Each play maps to a different finding.
When a prepaid card hits card_restrictions_authorization_failed or do_not_honor, those errors don't recover on retry. The card can't be used for recurring billing. Prompt the customer to add a credit card or bank account at that exact point, not in a dunning email three days later. Timing is where most of the recovery happens.
The Step 6 Gateway Account breakdown often surfaces a 20 to 40 percentage point difference in prepaid auth rates between gateways. If Gateway 1 handles prepaid at 71% and Gateway 3 handles it at 34%, routing prepaid-funded transactions to Gateway 1 is recoverable without any checkout change. This is the highest-leverage move when the cross-gateway gap is large.
Use when: large auth rate spread across gateways If insufficient_funds makes up more than half your prepaid error volume, those are recoverable. The customer just needs to reload the card. Space retries further apart than you would for credit (weekly rather than every 2–3 days), aligned to when prepaid cards are typically loaded (paydays, monthly top-ups). Keep hard-decline retries tight or remove them.
Once you've addressed the main issue, set a Reveal alert scoped to Funding Type: Prepaid. If the prepaid decline rate spikes above your new baseline, whether from a new geography, a new card type restriction, or a gateway rule change, you'll know before month-end. The alert carries the segment and deviation, so whoever gets it can act without a five-tab investigation.
Use when: ongoing monitoring after fixing the main issueStart optimizing prepaid card revenue right away
Connect your gateways and Reveal builds the cross-stack funding-type picture in about a day: prepaid vs credit auth rates, the specific error codes driving prepaid failures, and which gateway handles prepaid best. If you'd rather have our team run the diagnosis for you, we do that too.