Manual Debit Reviews Cost Banks Up to $2.4 Million a Year

Debit-card issuers rely on real-time authorization systems to approve legitimate purchases while blocking fraud. When legacy tools cannot resolve exceptions, transactions are routed to manual review, raising operating costs and slowing decisions. PYMNTS said the burden extends beyond staffing: false declines can drive away customers and erase transaction revenue, while missed fraud creates direct losses. The findings make authorization performance a strategic issue for banks and add urgency to modernization efforts across debit processing and risk operations.

A recent PYMNTS study estimated that manual debit reviews and authorization shortcomings can cost a bank as much as $2.4 million a year. A performance gap of just 0.5 percentage point in authorization rates may translate into tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue each month. Over a 12-month period, those forgone approvals compound with the expense of investigating exceptions, rejecting legitimate purchases and absorbing losses from fraudulent transactions.