Use Case: Hold a Transaction to Respond to Suspicious Activity

You can manually create holds on transactions that are suspicious or otherwise high-risk. This can be useful while you’re still configuring your decision or policy criteria to automate the process. This tutorial walks you through the steps to create a hold, review the transactions, and release the transaction after review.

Objective

Create a hold on a suspicious Merchant transaction, review the transaction, and release the hold.

Prerequisites

Note

You must have a fully boarded Payrix Pro account to perform any of the actions described in the use case guides.

Tips

Tip

When reviewing transactions, the highest-risk activity to monitor for are Transaction Fraud, Credit Risk, Merchant Fraud, and Money Laundering.

Additional Resources

See the tips below to help you get started.

• See Partner Transaction Monitoring Best Practices for guidance on identifying transaction risks.

• See the Merchant Monitoring Risk Guide for steps to mitigate risks associated with Merchants' payment transactions and other activities,

Create and Respond to a Transaction Hold

Ensure that you complete all steps in the following sections.

Create a Transaction Hold

1. Click Payment History under the Payments category in the left navigation panel.

2. Click the listed transaction you want to hold to access the Transaction Details page.

3. Click Hold to send the transaction to the Risk Management page Transactions queue.

Result: The hold has been successfully placed on the transaction.

Review the Held Transaction

1. Click Risk under the Admin category in the left navigation panel.

2. Click the Transactions tab at the top of the page, then locate your held transaction.

3. Click the listing to access the Transaction Underwriting page for the transaction.

4. Click Underwriting and Transaction Risk in the bottom-right corner to review risk information about the Merchant and the transaction.  

Result: You can now review more detailed risk information about the Merchant and the specific transaction to determine how you’d like to release the hold.

Respond to the Hold

1. After reviewing the risk information associated with the Merchant and transaction, return to the Transaction Underwriting page.

2. Release the hold by voiding the transaction, reserving the transaction funds, or approving the transaction:  

Result: The transaction hold has been released based on your review and release choice to either return the funds to the Merchant’s customer or process the transaction as normal, possibly reserving the funds for later resolution of customer issues.

Next Steps

After the transaction has been held, reviewed, and released, review the following guides for related topics:

• Hold a Merchant Boarding to Perform a Review: Place a new Merchant’s boarding status to Manual Review to perform a risk review before boarding.

• Automate Risk Reviews with Policies: Use the policies feature to automate future transaction holds or Merchant boarding reviews with different risk criteria.

Conclusion

The transaction in question has now been successfully held, reviewed for risk factors, and released in the form of a voided transaction, completed transaction processing with reserved funds, or approved transaction processing as normal.