Approval rate is the share of deposit attempts that end in a confirmed payment. It is the most quoted payments metric and one of the least comparable, because almost nobody defines it the same way.
Before comparing any number, three choices must be aligned:
- Attempts or intents? A cascade retrying three times can turn one failure into three, or into an approval that looks better than it was.
- Do abandoned sessions count? Someone who quit before the payment step is a funnel problem, not a payments problem, mixing them hides both.
- Per method or blended? PIX and card behave completely differently; a single number makes it impossible to see either degrading.
A meaningful share of the loss is usually not a hard decline but intent that never completes: timeout, one extra field at confirmation, a badly configured limit. Breaking the metric down by cause before negotiating with the provider avoids blaming the PSP for something of your own.
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