Introduction to Online Payments Risk Management

Chapter 6. Hiring for Your RMP Team

How do you start a RMP team? How big should it be? When do you hire engineers, statisticians, and others? These are very common questions when approaching RMP for the first time. Even for experienced risk managers, the question of the ideal employee profile still stands. How do you build the team?

When discussing hiring, I constantly emphasize the need for domain experts. By that, I refer to people who understand the customers’ behaviors, needs, and their results both generally for the industry and specifically for your business. They have deep understanding of what this book is about—detecting, analyzing, and solving loss-causing problems. Most importantly, their understanding is anchored in actual work experience, having looked at and solved a large number of problems over a long period of time. Domain experts can be hired with experience, but a large number of them will grow in your organization, as they learn through operating your product and talking to customers.

Some Important Comparison Points

Every team is slightly different, but the following metrics are the most common and should drive your team composition:

• Your eventual loss rate should be determined by your business model. For most online businesses using credit card, that’s under 1% across your portfolio.
• Your review rate—the percent of purchases your team manually reviews—should be under 1% for matured segments and markets, and no more than 30% for new ones. If you aren’t close to ...