TrueBiz launches Merchant Monitoring for ongoing, real-time protection 

If understanding merchant risk at the point of onboarding is challenging, monitoring that risk as merchants grow and evolve is even more cumbersome and complex. How do you know that merchants you approved on day one haven’t moved into prohibited areas, or substantially changed their business model? And what if you find out too late?

TrueBiz Merchant Monitoring makes it easy to maintain oversight. It gives you a real-time view of risk signals, and offers always-on protection against evolving merchant risk. TrueBiz upgrades your risk processes from static, one-time search to flexible and fully automated assessment, defending your business against the costs of non-compliance.

Good merchants today could become bad merchants tomorrow

Verifying merchant risk at onboarding is critical – but it’s only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to protecting your business. After merchants are approved, they need to be monitored constantly to ensure they haven’t evolved into higher-risk areas.

Till now, that’s been challenging. In most cases, businesses only rerun merchant risk assessment ad-hoc: when another risk signal is triggered at best, or just at monthly intervals at worst. This exposes them to significant risk. If merchant behavior changes the day after assessments are performed, businesses could be in breach of compliance – and racking up the associated costs – for days, weeks or even months.

But what’s the alternative? Legacy providers move too slowly to offer meaningful protection. Human-in-the-loop processes don’t return results at the required speed to bake ongoing monitoring into step-up identification workflows. They’re cumbersome, and the additional cost they incur means it doesn’t make economic sense to run risk assessments more often.

Assess merchant risk in real-time and on your schedule

TrueBiz Merchant Monitoring offers a flexible and robust solution for ongoing assessment. It automates the review of hundreds of subtle signals from across a merchant’s web presence in under 30 seconds. 

Merchant Monitoring Lite looks for risk signals to answer key fundamental questions: is the merchant’s website still operational? Is there an obvious move to a higher risk business? Payment providers may find themselves facing thousands of dollars in chargebacks if merchants cease trading suddenly, and at high risk of fines if the nature of the business changes.

This monitoring module is a lightweight and cost effective way of ensuring the merchant has not suddenly shut down or changed operations but continued to process payments.

Merchant Risk Core takes the above factors into account, and delves deeper to find out:

1. Has the nature of the merchant’s business changed? Merchants can move from low-risk areas into high-risk or prohibited areas after the point of onboarding, or just changed their business altogether. This puts businesses in breach of compliance, and at risk of aggressive action from card networks particularly if signs of transaction laundering have gone undetected.

2. Has sentiment about the merchant changed? Bad reviews or significant declines in web traffic could be indicators of stress on the merchant, and a sign of additional chargeback risk in future.

3. Has ownership of the business changed? A change in ownership is a signal that more thorough merchant risk assessment is required.

Both products are underpinned by proprietary machine learning and large language models that provide detailed insights in real-time. Merchant risk monitoring is fully automated, which enables businesses to run risk assessment more frequently. 

Businesses can define their own schedule for risk monitoring. Because TrueBiz Merchant Monitoring is API-first, it’s more flexible than legacy solutions. Monitoring can be run programmatically, or triggered by an API call. Should something significant change suddenly, businesses can react immediately to protect themselves against compliance and financial risk.

Be reactive in an evolving risk landscape

Payments providers are under increasing pressure to make their merchant risk assessment more robust and real-time. On one side, the rise of AI is equipping fraudsters to make more sophisticated attacks at speed and scale. On the other, card networks are cracking down on compliance breaches, and issuing substantial fines if issues are caught before you’ve identified them.

TrueBiz Merchant Monitoring gives businesses the tools they need to keep visibility across merchant risk, and move quickly when circumstances change. It makes it easy to integrate monitoring into a waterfall approach, and step up defenses as required. 

To learn more about Merchant Monitoring, book a demo here.