27 January 2026 · James Okeke
Failed payments are not the same as goodbye
Card retries, expired details, and a true cancel sit in the same ‘lost’ column in too many houses. They should not.
Card schemes retry. Direct debits fail because an account closed. A subscriber who meant to stay will sometimes sit in “lost” for three weeks while finance retries. Folding that group into voluntary cancel inflates churn and hides a collections problem.
We ask for the payment outcome on each billed period: paid, failed, retried, written off. Without that, a lifecycle map will blame the editorial offer for a bank-change weekend. With it, you can see whether leaving after a failed debit clusters in a particular tenure month — often the first annual invoice on a card that expired.
Do not wait for a “dunning product”. A simple extract of failed events and a subsequent paid event is enough for a Pathbase chart. If no subsequent paid event exists, that is a true leave by non-payment, and it should sit beside — not inside — the cancel-box reasons.