Failed Card Transactions

Overview

Tuition payments are the financial lifeblood of early childhood education providers, yet card failures were happening quietly in the background with no clear signal or next step. I led the effort to make these failures visible and actionable, giving providers the context to recover revenue and reducing the support burden created by confusing, opaque payment outcomes.

The problem

Prior to the release, users could only see failed ACH transactions in the application. To understand when a parent had attempted a card payment that failed, they had to log in to another system and generate a report. The problem was made worse because autopay commonly re-attempted cards that were failing for different reasons — resulting in delayed tuition payments for the centers and missed payment-processing revenue for the business.

The solution

All Transactions — failed card payments surfaced inline with their specific decline reason.

We carefully sorted through the payment logic and successfully started including these transactions across the billing sections of the app, along with the details as to why each payment failed. We found that many parents had balances going unpaid because of resolvable issues like "Expired Cards" — and simply exposing the failures and their reasons allowed parents and centers to take the necessary actions. This led to a 25% decrease in failed card transactions, ultimately increasing revenue collected through a stronger card-to-ACH ratio and decreasing the resources spent attempting to process card transactions that could easily be resolved.

My approach

• Instrumented and analyzed the payment flow to quantify failure volume and isolate the most common, addressable failure reasons.

• Designed a clear in-product view that surfaces each failed transaction alongside its specific decline reason and recommended recovery action.

• Prioritized the highest-impact failure categories so providers could resolve the issues that recovered the most revenue first.

• Closed the loop with support and success teams to confirm the change reduced escalations and improved payment trust.

Tools & methods