Use Case: Hold a Merchant Boarding to Perform a Review

You can place a Merchant’s boarding status into Manual Review when their Portal account is created but has not yet been fully boarded. This can be extremely helpful for highly sensitive Merchant locations and industries to verify low-risk and full compliance. This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to change and update a Merchant’s boarding status and perform a risk review.

Objective

Set a newly created Merchant to Manual Review to review the risks associated and update the status as needed.

Audience

Facilitators
Referrers

Environment

Portal (Sandbox)
Portal (Production)

Prerequisites

Prerequisites:

You must have a fully boarded Payrix account to perform any of the actions described in the use case guides.
A new Merchant must complete and submit a signup form.

Warnings

Warnings will provide insight or advice to avoid issues related to risk, visibility, and overall product performance during this use case.

Warning: Facilitators are responsible for the assumption of risk for their Referrer & Merchant offering. As a result, Facilitators should ensure thorough reviews of manually held transactions is performed before releasing to minimize potential legal or compliance complications.

Tips

Tips will provide suggestions to streamline or better prepare you to apply this use case tutorial.

Tip: For Referrers under Payrix, the risk parameters will automatically flag Merchants for manual review if auto-boarding is not configured.

Tip: When updating your Merchant’s Boarding Status in the Underwriting page, you can optionally place a one-time reserve on the Merchant to reserve funds in cases where you are uncertain about risk factors that could result in negative charges. This reserve can help offset the costs your business may incur as a result.

Additional Resources

Read Merchant Onboarding Risk - Best Practices for guidance on identifying Merchant boarding risks.
Read Merchant Risk Prevention for steps to mitigate risks associated with boarding Merchants.

Hold and Review a new Merchant

1. Access the Merchant Profile

Step 1: Click Merchants in the left-hand navigation panel to open the Merchants page.
Step 2: Click the new Merchant’s listing to open the Merchant Profile page.

2. Change the Merchant’s Boarding Status

Step 1: Click the Account tab under the Business menu and click the Edit icon.
Step 2: Click the Boarding Status drop-down and select Manual Review.
Step 3: Click the Confirm icon next to the Account tab.

Result: The Merchant’s boarding status has been changed to manual review and a new listing has been automatically created on the Risk Management page.

3. Access the Merchant’s Underwriting page

Step 1: Click Risk under the Admin category in the left-hand navigation panel to open the Risk Management page.
Step 2: Click the Merchants tab, then locate the Merchant you’d like to review.
Step 3: Click the Merchant’s listing to open the Underwriting page.

4. Review the Merchant

Step 1: On the Merchant Underwriting page, review the various Risk Card data provided for points of possible fraud or irregularity.
Step 2: If there are any irregularities to note for other risk analysts, click the Add Note button in the Notes and Documents panel.

Result: You’ve now performed your manual risk review of the Merchant, listing any irregularities or high-risk information in a note for other analysts in your business.

5. Update the Merchant’s Boarding Status

Step 1: Return to the top of the Merchant Underwriting page to update the Merchant’s boarding status.
Step 2: Based on your decision, change the Merchant’s status:

Merchant Boarding Status Update Options

Approve for Boarding - If your review is positive and you’re ready to release the hold and board the Merchant, click the Board button at the top of the page.
Decline - If your review is negative and you find high-risk factors that you want to avoid with this Merchant, click the Status button and select Denied.
- When you choose Denied, you’ll have to select one of the following reasons:
  - Rejected - Declined after manual review for any reason.
  - Fraud - Declined after Fraud was detected during manual review.
  - No Response - Declined after missing info was discovered and the Merchant was contacted to address the issue, but did not respond.
  - Withdrawn - Declined after the Merchant has decided to withdraw their submission and no longer wants to use your platform.

Result: Your Merchant’s Boarding Status 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

Once you’ve manually reviewed the Merchant, review the following guides for related topics:

Hold a Transaction to Respond to Suspicious Activity: Manually create Holds on transactions that are suspicious or otherwise high-risk using the Hold a Transaction to Respond to Suspicious Activity use case.
Automate Risk Reviews with Policies: Use the Policies feature to automate future transaction holds or Merchant Boarding reviews with different risk criteria using the Automate Risk Reviews with Policies use case.

Conclusion

Once the Merchant has been manually reviewed, and the status changed to “Board” they are ready to use the platform immediately.

References

Click the links or items below to access any of the following pages:

Merchant Onboarding Risk - Best Practices
Merchant Risk Prevention
Merchants page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Merchant Profile page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Risk Management page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Merchant Underwriting page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Hold a Transaction to Respond to Suspicious Activity
Automate Risk Reviews with Policies