Ecommpay has published research arguing that e-commerce subscription businesses are losing an average of 9% of revenue to failed payments, a figure the London-based payments platform says is largely invisible to finance and growth teams focused on acquisition metrics.
The company’s new playbook, titled “4 Pillars of Subscription Growth”, draws on third-party data showing that 7% of recurring charges fail on first attempt. With 77% of consumers reported to be actively auditing their subscriptions on at least a monthly basis, Ecommpay contends that a failed-payment notification can itself become a cancellation prompt, surfacing the cost of a subscription at precisely the moment a customer is most likely to reconsider it.
Roy Blokker, head of strategic sales at Ecommpay, put the commercial problem plainly: “The next subscription growth advantage won’t come from another discount or win-back campaign. It will come from payment infrastructure that keeps customers connected when billing fails in the background.”
The four pillars
Ecommpay groups its proposed remedies under what it calls “invisible retention,” a phrase it uses to describe payment recovery that operates without triggering cancellation workflows. The four pillars it outlines are: intelligent automated retries, network tokenisation, Direct Debit, and Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs).
On retries, Ecommpay says its system uses decline-code analysis and salary-cycle timing to recover between 15% and 30% of initially failed transactions before any manual customer action is required. The company is careful to note that individual results vary by sector, geography and payment mix, a caveat worth retaining given the breadth of that range.
Network tokenisation is presented as the structural answer to card expiry, one of the most common drivers of involuntary churn. Ecommpay reports that merchants using its tokenised subscription product are seeing renewal success rates up to 3 percentage points higher, based on comparative merchant data, though the company acknowledges results vary.
For higher-value B2B and usage-based billing, the playbook advocates Bacs and SEPA Direct Debit, which the company says can achieve success rates above 95% and carry lower processing costs on large transactions. VRPs, powered by open banking rails, are positioned as a card-free alternative offering instant settlement, no interchange fees and no traditional card chargebacks, with customers retaining the ability to adjust or revoke mandates directly through their banking provider.
Regulatory backdrop
The timing of the playbook is not accidental. New UK consumer protection rules under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, announced in April 2026 and expected to come into force in spring 2027, will mandate transparency, renewal reminders and straightforward cancellation processes for subscription businesses. Ecommpay frames its retention approach as complementary to those requirements rather than in tension with them, emphasising that customers retain full visibility and cancellation rights at all stages.
That framing matters commercially. The incoming DMCCA rules have attracted scrutiny from consumer groups and the Competition and Markets Authority, and any vendor positioning payment recovery as a retention tool will need to demonstrate clearly that its approach does not impede the right to cancel. Ecommpay’s playbook goes out of its way to make this distinction, which suggests the company is conscious of the regulatory optics.
The broader market context is that subscription billing infrastructure has become a competitive segment in its own right. Players including Recurly, Chargebee and Stripe‘s billing suite compete directly in retry logic, tokenisation and dunning management. Ecommpay’s differentiator is the integration of VRPs via its open banking capability, a rail that most pure-play subscription platforms do not yet natively support, and one that the Payment Systems Regulator has been pushing banks to enable more broadly. Whether that advantage proves durable will depend on how quickly open banking VRP adoption scales among both merchants and consumers in the UK and across SEPA jurisdictions.
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