Category Archives: Payments
Subscription Payment Retry Logic and Dunning Management: A Payments PM’s Guide
What Is Subscription Payment Retry Logic? Subscription payment retry logic is the system that determines what happens when a recurring charge fails — which decline codes get retried, how quickly, how many times, and with what modifications. Done well, it recovers a significant percentage of initially failed recurring payments. Done poorly, it wastes money, generates…
Payments Product Manager Interview Questions: What to Expect and How to Answer
Preparing for a payments product manager interview? Below are the questions that come up most often when fintechs, payment processors and enterprise merchants hire a payments product manager, and what a strong answer covers for each. Who This Payments Product Manager Guide Is For This guide is written for two audiences: payments product managers preparing…
How to Choose a Payment Processor: A Framework from a Senior Payments PM
Why Choosing a Payment Processor Is a Product Decision Most guides on choosing a payment processor treat it as a procurement exercise: compare pricing, check feature lists, pick the cheapest option that covers your needs. That framing misses the most important dimension. Your payment processor affects your authorization rate, your fraud exposure, your compliance posture,…
Adyen vs Stripe: An Enterprise PM’s Honest Comparison
The Short Answer Adyen and Stripe are both excellent payment processors. They serve different needs, and the right choice depends on your business model, technical maturity, transaction volume, and geographic footprint. This comparison is written from the perspective of a Senior Product Manager who has integrated and worked with both in enterprise environments — not…
Transaction Labeling in Payments: How Descriptor Optimization Improves Authorization Rates
What Is Transaction Labeling in Payments? Transaction labeling — sometimes called merchant descriptor optimization or soft descriptor optimization — is the practice of controlling the data your payment sends to the issuing bank at the moment of authorization. Specifically, it means ensuring that the merchant name, category code (MCC), and transaction type signals you transmit…
Payment Decline Codes Explained: What They Mean and How to Fix Them
Updated September 2026. EXC W/D FREQ LIM (Code 65) Explained Quick answer: “EXC W/D FREQ LIM” is the issuer response code 65, “exceeds withdrawal frequency limit”. It is a soft decline. The issuer is saying this card has hit a limit on how many transactions it allows in a time window, or, for some European…
Authorization Rate Optimization: A Payments PM’s Complete Guide
Authorization rate is one of the most important metrics in payments — and one of the least understood outside of payments teams. A small improvement in auth rate can mean millions in recovered revenue. A persistent decline can silently kill a product. This guide covers what authorization rate actually means, what moves it, and how…
What Is Payment Orchestration? Definition, Benefits, and Examples
Payment orchestration is the layer that sits between your checkout and your payment processors — routing transactions intelligently, retrying failed payments, and giving you a single integration point to manage multiple acquirers, gateways and fraud tools. It has become one of the most important infrastructure decisions for any eCommerce business processing significant volume. Why Payment…
What Is Open Banking? A Payments Product Manager’s Guide
Open banking is the regulatory and technical framework that requires banks to share customer financial data — with the customer’s consent — with third-party providers via standardised APIs. It is the foundation of a new generation of payment products, from account-to-account payments that bypass card networks to personal finance tools that aggregate data across multiple…
ISO 20022 Explained: Why Payments Product Managers Should Care
ISO 20022 is a global messaging standard for financial services — a common language for payments systems to communicate with each other. It is replacing the legacy SWIFT MT message format and is being adopted across CHAPS, SEPA, Fedwire, CHIPS and other major payment rails worldwide. For payments product managers, it is one of the…