Optimize Your Manual Review Process in 2016
From single owner e–commerce store fronts to major online retailers, many businesses that rely on card–not–present (CNP) transactions for revenue are still saddled with a slow, ineffective method of fraud prevention known as manual review. Facing rising fraud rates in 2016, these businesses are recognizing that using manual review, while a critical part of preventing fraud, takes too much of their time and leads them to decline too many orders, stagnating growth.
The Problems with Manual Review
E
–
commerce business owners are all too familiar with the shortcomings of manual review:
It’s expensive.
Manual review takes time and focus, often from a dedicated
team of reviewers. The
resources businesses put toward manual review can quickly add up to represent the biggest line item in a
fraud or loss prevention budget.
It’s inefficient.
Merchants who conduct manual reviews analyzed 27% of transactions in 2011,
according
to a report from fraud prevention leader
. Of the orders that underwent manual review, an average of 75%
were ultimately approved. A reviewed
–
to
–
approved ratio that high represents in
efficiency in targeting
questionable transactions.
It’s not scalable.
With about one
–
in
–
four orders undergoing manual review, the owner of a small e
–
commerce business finds him or herself able to easily manually review 100 transactions per month without
hi
ring more staff. But 1,000? What about 10,000?
It slows down your customers.
Emerging business models that utilize in
–
app purchases, especially gaming
platforms, face the reality that manual review of these instantaneous, often impulse
–
driven transactions,
can
slow down the customer experience and put a bottleneck into a major revenue stream.
Fraud Rates Nearly Doubled in 2015
So what do merchants have to show for the monumental cost of billions of manually reviewed transactions?A rising fraud rate, for one. As a portion of revenue, fraud was up to 1.32% in 2015, nearly double the rate merchants saw the year before, according to LexisNexis’ True Cost of Fraud 2015 Study.
Make no mistake; fraud transactions that are not caught can have devastating effects on a business: costly fees, strained relationships with third party partners and processors, lost revenue, sunk shipping costs, and even a spot on the Terminated Merchant File (aka the MATCH List).
A Balanced Approach to Stopping Fraud
None of this is to say that manual review should be put out to pasture. There are times when human reasoning is needed to distinguish between perfectly innocent transactions held up for administrative reasons and the truly shady orders that constitute real fraud. Without a reviewer using empathy to make a judgment call, you may decline (and alienate) a new customer or a loyal one.
Manual review, though, should be part of a balanced approach that uses to
ols to optimize the process by
providing more data for reviewers to use, and targeting fewer benign transactions for review in the first
place. A few key areas hold opportunities to streamline manual review:
