What happens when a customer tries to make a purchase but doesn’t have enough funds?
In the simplest use case, the issuer just declines the payment due to insufficient funds. The customer stows the declined card back into their wallet and swipes a different card.
But what about situations where the goal is to spend every available dollar from the original payment method, before using an alternate payment method?
This is particularly common in healthcare, where a patient may need to pay a $200 bill but only has $140 remaining on their HSA card.
If the patient uses a personal card to pay the $200, they still have $140 languishing, unused, on the HSA card.
This is where partial auth comes in.
Instead of declining the initial payment with the HSA card, the issuer returns a partial authorization for $140.
The patient is then prompted to provide a different payment method for the remaining $60.
This scenario is particularly common with HSA/FSA cards, but partial auth can increase authorization rates across any vertical or industry by reducing the number of declines due to insufficient funds.
Partial auth is now available for all Rainforest platforms via API and embeddable component!
Read more about it here: https://docs.rainforestpay.com/docs/partial-authorization