As fraud challenges escalate and customer acquisition costs climb to $200-400 per subscriber, understanding your payment performance is a competitive necessity.
Here are three payment metrics every MVNO should track in 2026.
1. Approval rate: the revenue you’re capturing
Why it matters: Your approval rate is the percentage of transaction attempts that successfully process. If you’re running at 85% approval, that means 15% of transactions are failing—including legitimate customers trying to pay you.
The math: For a 100,000-subscriber MVNO at $25/month:
- 85% approval rate = $25.5M annual revenue
- 92% approval rate = $27.6M annual revenue
- The difference: $2.1M in captured revenue
What to ask your processor: What’s our current approval rate? How does it compare to your telecom client average? Can you show me trends over the past six months?
If they can’t or won’t answer, that’s a red flag.
2. Decline reason distribution: understanding why you’re losing transactions
Telecommunications fraud costs the industry billions of dollars annually, so fraud prevention matters. But there’s a critical difference between catching actual fraud and flagging normal telecom behavior as suspicious.
The telecom-specific problem: Generic payment processors use fraud models built for e-commerce. A prepaid customer topping up at 2 a.m. looks suspicious. Family plans with SIM cards shipping to different addresses trigger fraud alerts. International roaming spikes get blocked.
These aren’t always fraud patterns—they could be normal wireless behavior.
Why it matters: Not all declines are equal. “Suspected fraud” or “do not honor” might be your processor being overly conservative with telecom patterns they don’t understand.
What to ask your processor:
- What percentage of our declines are fraud-related vs. other reasons?
- Are declines concentrated in specific customer segments (prepaid, international, roaming)?
- Can you show patterns by time of day and transaction type?
Understanding decline reasons helps you spot false positives—legitimate customers being rejected because your processor doesn’t understand telecom.
3. True cost per transaction: beyond the advertised rate
That super-low processing rate looks attractive until you calculate what it actually costs.
The hidden costs:
- Processing fees (advertised rate)
- Chargeback fees ($15-100 per incident)
- Fraud losses you’re absorbing
- Payment-related support costs
- Revenue lost to false declines
Calculate your real rate:
(Total processing fees + chargeback fees + fraud losses + support costs) ÷ successful transactions
A processor charging 2.5% with an 82% approval rate and no fraud protection might cost more than one charging 3% who delivers 93% approval rates and covers fraud losses.
Why it matters: For a 100,000-subscriber MVNO at $25/month, a 1% approval rate improvement generates $300,000 annually. That dwarfs any savings from negotiating 0.2% off your processing rate.
What this means for 2026
The operators thriving in 2026 will be those who:
- Track approval rates monthly and understand what drives them
- Dig into decline reasons to spot false positives
- Calculate true cost per transaction, not just advertised rates
- Demand transparency from their payment partners
- Work with processors whose success depends on their success
The bottom line: Payment processing might not be the most exciting part of running an MVNO, but it’s one of the biggest levers you have for capturing revenue you’re already earning.
In 2026, knowing your numbers—and demanding better from your payment partner—could be worth millions.
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