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 article shows you how to create a hold on a suspicious merchant transaction, review the transaction, and release the hold after review.
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.
Create a Transaction Hold
Complete the following steps to place a hold on a transaction:
Select Payment History under Payments in the left navigation panel.
Select the listed transaction you want to hold to access the Transaction Details page.
Click Hold to send the transaction to the Transactions queue on the Risk Management page.
Review the Held Transaction
Complete the following steps to review risk information about the merchant and the specific transaction to determine how you want to release the hold:
Select Risk under Admin in the left navigation panel.
Select the Transactions tab at the top of the page, then locate your held transaction.
Select the listing to access the Transaction Underwriting page for the transaction.
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
After reviewing the risk information associated with the merchant and transaction, return to the Transaction Underwriting page.
Release the hold by voiding the transaction, reserving the transaction funds, or approving the transaction:
Void Transaction: Cancel processing and return the funds to the merchant’s customer.
Send To Reserve: Allow processing and funding, but withhold the funds from the merchant for a specific time if anticipating transaction refunds or chargebacks.
Approve: Release the hold and allow processing and funding of the transaction as normal.
Result: The transaction hold is released based on your 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 articles 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.