Payment Processing Latency

Payment processing latency is the time a payment takes to travel through the systems involved and return a result, measured from when it is submitted to when the payer or merchant receives an approval, decline or confirmation. For a card authorisation it is typically counted in milliseconds or seconds, and each hop adds to it: the terminal or checkout, the payment gateway, the processor, the card network and the issuer's own systems, plus any fraud screening along the way. Network latency is only one part; database lookups, risk checks and retries add more. Excessive latency can cause timeouts, abandoned checkouts and duplicate submissions. Instant payment schemes set explicit limits; the rulebook for SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, for example, requires funds to reach the payee within 10 seconds. Also see real-time payment systems and payment routing.