Introduction to Online Payments Risk Management

Chapter 9. Action: Dealing with Your Findings

Once you know what needs to be done, using the right tools is the next step. There are several ways to make a change: from ops procedures, through decision systems, and all the way to product changes.

Decision and loss-reduction mechanisms vary by their flexibility, time to market, and impact. Flexibility and time to market improve as you move farther in the application lifecycle—further away from real-time decisions—and impact is reduced accordingly. The lack of flexibility in the front end shouldn’t be taken for granted, and a new model’s time to market can and should be at the 3 month range rather than the 9–18 months that are most common in large organizations. Still, models vs. rules vs. manual decisions have different advantages and disadvantages and should be used accordingly.

Manual Review

Manually reviewing an application is the core activity of every RMP team. Much like you wouldn’t hire a developer who can’t write code, you wouldn’t want a domain expert that cannot make a decision when reviewing an application. Manual review is not only about making accurate decisions, it is also about knowing when the information you have is insufficient, identifying patterns, and developing a taste for what a mistake looks and feels like. Manual review helps you keep track of your system’s pulse and is the basis for more detailed root cause analysis, the most important activity in the problem-solving cycle.

Barring the downsides of a manual ...