Skip to main content
Nerve Centre KPIs · Audit Profile · Sentiment Settings CyberSource-specific health audit. Answers four questions: (1) is the authorisation success rate healthy and is the decline-reason mix free of a dominant soft-decline; (2) is Decision Manager / 3DS friction tuned right (not over-blocking, not under-protecting); (3) are refunds and chargebacks within network thresholds; (4) is settlement batching on schedule. The cross-channel area joins decline and dispute signals to the commerce-sibling checkout funnel and fulfilment status to size live revenue at risk.

​
What this audit checks

​
Authentication & access

  • REST API shared-secret (key id + secret) is live-mode for production merchants
  • Merchant ID + API host (api.cybersource.com vs apitest) correctly classified
  • Roles cover Transaction Search (tss), Reporting (reporting/v3), refunds and settlement
  • Report subscriptions enabled for settlement + dispute reports

​
Transaction health

  • Authorisation success rate above 92% baseline
  • Decline reason mix - no single soft-decline reason code > 25% of declines
  • Soft-decline retry / account-updater recovering > 25% of recoverable declines
  • Top declining issuers (BIN-level) identified for a recovery playbook

​
Decision Manager & 3DS friction

  • 3DS challenge abandon rate < 25% (otherwise review challenge routing)
  • Decision Manager reject rate not surging > 50% vsP (sudden tightening can mask an outage)
  • Frictionless vs challenge mix healthy for the merchant’s risk profile
  • Manual-review queue age within SLA (stale reviews leak revenue)

​
Refunds & chargebacks

  • Refund rate not spiked > 50% vs the 7-day baseline
  • Chargeback rate below 0.9% (90% of the Visa 1% cap) on a 90-day window
  • Pending dispute response time < 5 days
  • Top dispute reason codes flagged for prevention

​
Settlement & payouts

  • Settlement batches submitting on schedule (no stuck batch)
  • No payout / settlement pending > 5 days vs the typical cycle
  • Capture-to-settlement reconciliation matches authorised totals

​
Cross-channel: revenue protection

  • Decline-driven checkout-funnel drop (sibling = shopify/bigcommerce/adobe.checkout_step_completion_rate falling concurrent with cybersource.decline_rate spike)
  • Dispute-to-fulfilment correlation (sibling = shipbob/commerce.shipment_delayed_orders converting to not-received disputes)
  • Recoverable revenue forecast (soft-decline value * sibling.avg_repurchase_rate * retry success rate)

​
Severity thresholds

SignalWarnCritical
decline_rate68
authorization_rate92-
dispute_rate0.91.0
refund_rate58
payout_age_days35
threedsecure_abandon_rate2540

​
Data sources

  • POST https://{api_host}/tss/v2/searches - Transaction search across timeframes (auth, capture, refund, void)
  • GET https://{api_host}/reporting/v3/reports - Settlement, conversion-detail and dispute reports
  • GET https://{api_host}/risk/v1/authentications - 3DS / Payer Authentication outcomes for friction analysis
  • GET https://{api_host}/pts/v2/refunds - Refund history for refund-rate baseline