Authorize a Transaction

Estimated time: ~1 minute

Each transaction requires an approve or decline decision from the card issuer, known as an "authorization." With Lithic's Authorization Rules, you can get started quickly by creating customizable rules that determine whether a transaction should be automatically approved or declined based on high-signal attributes such as currency, Merchant Category Code (MCC), country, risk score, and more.

Create an Authorization Rule

For example, you can create an Authorization Rule that only allows transactions in USD. Any transaction in a different currency will be automatically declined. Here is how you would draft such a rule in shadow mode, applied at the program level:

{
  "type": "CONDITIONAL_BLOCK",
  "parameters": {
    "conditions": [
      {
        "attribute": "CURRENCY",
        "operation": "IS_ONE_OF",
        "value": ["USD"]
      }
    ]
  },
  "program_level": true  // Apply rule to all transactions in the program
}

Once you are satisfied with how the rule performs in shadow mode, you can promote it to active status to start influencing live transactions.

For more information on Authorization Rules, check out our in-depth guide: Authorization Rules.