Do Not Honor and other card refusals: What they mean and how to avoid them

Payment decline codes can be as ambiguous as they are ubiquitous. The 05 Do Not Honor credit card response can represent anything from 10% to 60% of your refused payments. But what does it actually mean? And what can you do about it? Unfortunately, there isn’t one easy answer. But years of experience analyzing authorization rates, partnering with card schemes, and building our own issuing bank has given us some ideas.