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 will walk 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

Prerequisites:

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

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

Additional Resources

• Read Transaction Monitoring - Best Practices for guidance on identifying transaction risks.

• Read Transaction Risk Prevention for steps to mitigate risks associated with payment transactions.

Create and Respond to a Transaction Hold

1. Create a Transaction Hold

• Step 1: Click Payment History under the Payments category in the left-hand navigation panel.

• Step 2: Click the listed transaction you’d like to hold to access the Transaction Details page.

• Step 3: Click the Hold button to send the transaction to the Risk Management page Transactions queue.

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

2. Review the Held Transaction

• Step 1: Click Risk under the Admin category in the left-hand navigation panel.

• Step 2: Click Transactions from the tabs at the top of the page, then locate your Held transaction.

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

• Step 4: Click the Underwriting and Transaction Risk buttons in the bottom right-hand 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.

3. Respond to the Hold

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

• Step 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

Once 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 using the Hold a Merchant Boarding to Perform a Review 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

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.

References

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

• Transaction Monitoring - Best Practices

• Transaction Risk Prevention

• Payment History page [Referrers][Facilitators]

• Transaction Details page [Referrers][Facilitators]

• Risk Management page [Referrers][Facilitators]

• Transaction Underwriting page [Referrers][Facilitators]

• Automate Risk Reviews with Policies

• Hold a Merchant Boarding to Perform a Review