Manual, reactive risk monitoring led to high losses

Our customer is a leading payment facilitator (PayFac) for merchants and software platforms. To be successful, it needs to stay on top of risks across a diverse range of customers and use cases. 

Historically, the company forwarded suspicious merchant activity and losses to manual reviews for a deeper investigation. This reactive approach created two issues: 1) it only responded to suspicious activity after it occurred, exposing the company to significant credit losses, and 2) it forced the team to spend more time on manual processes and data pulls instead of risk decisioning and actions.

These pain points came to a head when the team experienced a sizable credit loss from a large merchant that possessed leading indicators of fraudulent activity. The team realized it needed to switch from a reactive, manual risk management approach to a more proactive strategy. It engaged Coris to help automate its merchant monitoring and underwriting processes.

‍

Automated merchant insights and monitoring in 1 place

After a quick data test and seamless integration via API, the PayFac implemented Coris across its underwriting and ongoing monitoring functions:

• Underwriting: The team assesses the risk of incoming merchant applications by leveraging MerchantProfiler’s automated 3rd party platform reviews, adverse media checks on businesses and their owners, website presence analysis, address verification (address type and non-delivery exposure, or NDX), and LLM-powered merchant industry classification. 

• Ongoing monitoring: Once a merchant is on the platform, the team keeps a pulse on customers by setting up custom alerts for risk signals they care about. For example, if a merchant’s Google rating declines significantly or its website domain status changes, they will receive alerts directly within the Coris platform. This allows the team to centralize risk management information and actions in one place

‍

The result: lower fraud losses and 10s of hours saved per week

By using Coris’s automated merchant alerts, the PayFac can now catch suspicious actors upstream in the risk management process, mitigating fraudulent activity and driving down fraud losses.

The team also saves dozens of hours a week on merchant monitoring activities that used to be manual. Previously, a risk analyst would be responsible for monitoring dozens of merchants per week, with each merchant analysis taking 20 minutes or more. Using Coris, this analysis now takes seconds. In total, the PayFac has automated monitoring of 15,000-20,000 merchants with Coris.

‍

Want to learn more?

Interested in leveraging Coris to automate your merchant underwriting and ongoing monitoring strategies? Get in touch.