Billing platforms manage transactions. Specialized recovery platforms rescue the ones that fail. Learn why the difference matters to your bottom line.
Failed payments are one of the most overlooked causes of lost revenue in subscription businesses and have a huge impact on customer churn—more than 50% of involuntary churn is driven by payment failures, not by customers who actively want to cancel. That means even brands with great retention strategies and loyal users are losing revenue they could have saved—just because a card was declined.
Yet many subscription companies rely on built-in recovery tools provided by their billing platforms, such as Recurly, Stripe Billing, or Aria, to handle payment recovery. And while these platforms excel at managing invoices, processing subscriptions and automating revenue workflows, they aren’t built to optimize payment recovery. They do a decent job, if that’s good enough for you. But if a specialized solution can recover a much higher percentage of failed payments, that would make a huge difference to your bottom line, especially for large subscription businesses. That’s where the gap lies.
The Pros and Cons of Built-In Recovery
Billing platforms include some helpful recovery features. You’ll find tools like:
- Routing rules: Simple logic to reroute based on limited variables
- Retry logic: Attempting the failed payment again a few times
- Basic outreach: Triggering emails or follow-ups on failed charges
- These tools can reduce some friction, but they weren’t built to deeply analyze and act on the root cause of the failed payments.
Because these systems aren’t optimized for recovery, they can’t dynamically adapt to changing decline reason codes, issuer rules, or customer shopping patterns. And even if the platforms use AI or machine learning models, they and other financial partners—their data source is limited to existing merchants. Without this level of sophistication, businesses risk losing customers to involuntary churn—customers who may have stayed if their payment had been recovered effectively.
Why Specialized Recovery Platforms Deliver Better Results
Specialized platforms like FlexPay are built for one purpose: recovering failed payments. Unlike general billing platforms, FlexPay uses AI and machine learning trained on 6B transactionss as well as our merchant data to create an individual recovery strategy for each failed payment. Here’s how it works:
- AI/ML trained on failed transaction outcomes: FlexPay analyzes the unique patterns behind each failed payment—issuer behavior, failure reason codes, and more.
- Dynamic decisioning: Instead of rigid retry schedules, FlexPay dynamically adjusts when and how to retry based on the unique characteristics of each transaction.
- Continuous optimization: Our models improve with every transaction, adapting to the ever-changing behavior of banks, card networks, and custome
- Personalized outreach: If a failed payment can’t be recovered invisibly behind the scenes, FlexPay uses outreach that leverages behavioral science to achieve positive customer engagement.
The result? FlexPay customers recover up to 73% more failed payments on average—revenue that would otherwise be lost, even with built-in tools in place. Even businesses with relatively low failure rates (such as the 15% industry average) can see meaningful gains in revenue by upgrading their recovery technology.
Seamless Integration Without Disruption
One of the biggest hesitations subscription businesses have when considering new technology is the fear of disrupting their existing systems. But FlexPay was designed to layer on top of your current billing platform—not replace it. FlexPay’s Invisible Recovery™ works quietly in the background, optimizing failed payments without requiring a major overhaul or changes to how your subscription business operates.
FlexPay customer ClinicSense knows this tailored, intelligent approach results in dramatically higher recovery rates—they saw an incredible 69% increase in failed payment recovery over their baseline with their FlexPay and Stripe integration.
When integrating with FlexPay, the. Our team handles the configuration, monitors early performance, and resolves any issues that arise. For larger businesses, a dedicated account manager ensures optimal recovery performance, backed by payment analysts and support experts. And with no minimum time commitment, FlexPay removes the risk from the equation—you can see the results before making a long-term decision.
What to Consider When Choosing a Recovery Solution
As you think about the best way to optimize your payment recovery process, ask yourself a few key questions:
- Are your current tools designed to optimize recovery, or just to automate retries?
- Do you know why payments are failing—and do you tailor your response to each failure?
- Do you have the internal payments expertise to manage AI-driven recovery strategies on your own?
- Can your in-house solution support your continued growth? For larger companies, it’s increasingly more urgent to ensure the best solution is used.
If the answer to any of these questions is no, adding a specialized recovery solution is likely a smart, high-ROI move. Rather than relying on billing platforms that are built to bill—not recover—you can layer on a solution that’s been purpose-built for exactly this challenge.
Don’t Leave Revenue on the Table
Don’t Leave Revenue on the Table
Billing platform recovery tools are a good starting point, but they’re not enough if you’re serious about reducing churn and maximizing subscription revenue. Specialized platforms like FlexPay deliver the targeted technology, data-driven decisioning, and dedicated expertise needed to recover more failed payments—and drive more predictable growth.
Download our guide on AI-powered payment recovery to learn more about our solution.
The process is easy. The impact is measurable. And the results speak for themselves.
