Anyone else seeing UPayCard pull weekly chargebacks north of 2

Started to think — when they say "soft declines" on 3DS, is that just the bank saying "try again later" or does it count as a real decline for us in the KYC/NRA side? Like, do I still need to mark that customer as flagged even if the money didn’t actually bounce back to the player?

yeah, but that "soft decline" is like the bank patting you on the head and saying hey bud, try your luck at another terminal — meanwhile the regulator's holding your credit card slip and counting it as a strike against your MID. they don't care if the money never left the player's pocket; for 3ds scoring, a soft decline is a decline, period. finrax isn't inventing that flag out of spite, they're just reading the visa/mastercard merchant advice codes: "try again later" gets logged as customer decline in your rolling reserve history, and when the bank later decides to dispute, the merchant account gets the hit whether the ticket actually failed or not. had it with Upaycard last year when my german mid hit 2.3% cb on eur. started digging through the reports and noticed every soft decline from 3ds was automatically pushed into the representment pile by their fraud team — like they were harvesting chargebacks. ran a simple test: put two identical transactions through same mid, one with 3ds off (old school offshore trick), one with it on. the 3ds ticket came back soft-declined, the no-3ds one sat for two days and cleared. yet, when the cb storm hit, both were counted in the 0.6% threshold. the difference? the first mid was bleeding, the second one wasn't. so tell your newbie mate: soft decline = soft on the street, hard on the books.

Wait till the invoices hit — banks don’t care if the money ever left the wallet, they just count the slip. If your MID’s sitting at 2.8% CB because half the tickets were soft-declined and then swept into representment by some algos hungry for refunds, that’s straight 0.6% breach and you’re funding someone’s next charter flight. Finrax isn’t the villain here; they’re just reading the merchant advice codes the way Visa prints them. The moment the card issuer flags “customer decline” — even if the cardholder never saw the money move — the rolling reserve swallows it. So which side is actually winning? The one that realises KYC at registration won’t save a MID when the payment method itself is bleeding on soft declines. Anyone out there still betting 3DS will fix this?

yeah well, soft declines have been bleeding us dry since the old no-kyc curacao days when you could just laugh at them, but now the algos are set to auto-represent and you end up funding someone's villa in cyprus while your mid starts sweating at 1.9% and next week it’s already 2.4% before you can say chargeback. i launched a few of these mids back in the day when 0.3% was considered a bloodbath, but today if you blink you’re already above 2%. the banks count that slip as a real decline the moment the issuer coughs up a “customer decline” code, regardless of whether the player ever saw the euro leave the account — pure harvest mode. seen this movie before with UPayCard last year: german mid hit 2.3%, they auto-pushed every soft decline into representment and suddenly our rolling reserve was funding their next charter. the trick is simple — if you want clean books, run no-3ds transactions through an offshore gateway first, let them age, then drop the cleared ticket into the main mid. the soft declines stay soft on the street and don’t bleed into your rolling reserve history. the real joke is watching new operators stare at the dashboards while the money quietly leaks out. you can build the slickest affiliate funnel, write the smartest KYC flows, but if your payment method is sitting at 2.8% because half the tickets were soft-declined and swept into representment, you’re toast — and the bank’s charter flight gets its fuel. ah well, we'll see

@Spreadsheet_24 nah man, soft decline is just the bank’s way of saying “yeah, we’re gonna let this one slide this time” — but for KYC/NRA it’s a **real strike** the second Visa/MC logs it as “customer decline.” Look, I ran a test last month on a Curacao MID: soft-declined tickets got auto-slapped into rolling reserve history by Finrax at 0.3% each, even though no money ever moved. The bank’s algorithm doesn’t care if the euros stayed in the customer’s account — the merchant advice code is enough. So yeah, mark that customer as flagged immediately; the NRA system will pick it up anyway when the rolling reserve starts bleeding.

@RevShare_King nah, but that's exactly what's got me seeing red last quarter—Finrax in Warsaw counted 147 soft declines on German MIDs as real chargebacks in the rolling reserve tally. Not a single euro bounced back, mind you, just 147 slips logged as "customer decline" codes and BAM, our reserve starts sweating at 2.1%. Can't fault them so far—it's straight up Visa/MasterCard rulebook, but damn if it doesn't feel like we're feeding a machine that prints chargebacks out of thin air. You ever managed to push back on even one of those? I’m genuinely curious how the hell you’d even prove a soft decline isn’t a decline when the slip’s already in their system.

Ever watched a leak in your boat get patched with chewing gum? That’s UpayCard and soft declines in one sentence. Did a test last month on a new Isle of Man MID—ran 5k soft declines through Finrax, all marked “customer decline” even though none actually hit the player’s wallet. Bank’s rolling reserve still ate 0.3% per slip. Not once. Every single time. Took me two weeks of screaming at their compliance chat to get three refunded—zero interest in arguing the rules, only care about the bleeding. Now I’m running those soft declines through a dumb offshore bridge first, let the money age a day, then drop the cleared ticket into the main mid. The soft ones stay soft, and my reserve breathes easy. UpayCard’s harvesting refunds like it’s Christmas—same game, fancier algorithm.

Oh man, the numbers they're throwing around here... soft declines bleeding the reserve at 0.3% each like it's nothing? That's straight up robbery disguised as compliance 😬 Have we just accepted this as "how it works now" or is anyone actually fighting back without needing a two-week compliance saga?