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 shows you how to create a hold on a suspicious Merchant transaction, review the transaction, and release the hold after review.

Audience: partner

Create and Respond to a Transaction Hold

Complete all steps in the following sections to hold a transaction, review the transaction for risk factors, and release the transaction hold.

Prerequisites

Before attempting this tutorial, you must:

• Meet the general prerequisites described in Get Started with Use Case Tutorials.

Create a Transaction Hold

Complete the following steps to place a hold on a transaction:

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.

Review the Held Transaction

Complete the following steps to review risk information about the Merchant and the specific transaction to determine how you’d like to release the hold:

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.  

Tip

When reviewing transactions, the highest-risk activity to monitor for are transaction fraud, credit risk, merchant fraud, and money laundering.

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

Additionally, view the following content in the Risk and Compliance Guide:

• 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.