About Card Transaction Risk GScore

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Availability

This product is accessible to all financial institutions, whether you manage your own fraud policy or use Galileo’s managed services.

As the payment landscape evolves, customers increasingly expect real-time payments, not just through debit and credit card transactions, but also solutions such as BNPL, and across money movement options such as Real-Time Payments (RTPs) and FedNow. Given the speed of these transactions, it's crucial for both issuers and merchants to identify and block suspicious activity within seconds to minimize fraud exposure.

GScore addresses this need with a suite of machine learning–based risk scores that assess the risk of card and money-movement transactions in real-time. By analyzing multiple data points such as user behavior and transaction patterns, GScore empowers financial institutions, fintechs, and businesses to quickly detect and respond to potential fraud. This proactive approach helps reduce losses and ensures more efficient, secure operations.

Whether your transaction volumes increase or you expand into new markets, GScore integrates seamlessly with Galileo's risk products, providing consistent protection. It's designed to adapt to your specific needs, giving you greater control over how you prevent fraud and safeguard your business.

Galileo setup

GScore is available as part of Galileo’s Payment Risk Platform (PRP), which processes real-time fraud decisions. If you're using Galileo as a payment processor, PRP will automatically generate GScore for transaction risk assessments. Alternatively, non-Galileo clients can access GScore as a standalone service through our Risk APIs, and PRP will still run in the background to provide the GScore.

When using PRP for real-time fraud decisions:

1. Subscribe to GScore for available transaction types (e.g. Card Transaction Risk GScore, ACH Transaction Risk GScore).
2. Collaborate with the Galileo Risk Team to develop fraud rules using GScore.
3. Test the new rules on PRP to estimate the impact of GScore.
4. Implement the rules to block suspicious transactions using GScore.

When using GScore as a data point:

1. Integrate with Galileo's Risk APIs for available transaction types.
2. Send the transaction details via the Risk APIs.

Use case

This use case illustrates how GScore can be fine-tuned to reduce fraud losses by declining high-risk transactions in real time, helping businesses minimize fraud exposure and dispute-handling costs.

Declining high-risk transactions in real time

Scenario: A large retail bank aims to reduce fraud losses and dispute-handling costs by declining high-risk transactions in real time. However, they understand this could lead to more friction for cardholders when legitimate high-risk transactions are declined.

Solution with GScore: A cardholder swipes their card at a merchant, and the transaction request is sent to Galileo via the card network. PRP processes the transaction, running the bank's real-time fraud-decision engine powered by GScore.

The GScore model analyzes the transaction and assigns it a risk score of 0.75. Since the bank has set a threshold of 0.7 for high-risk transactions, this transaction is flagged as “High Risk.” PRP then runs the bank’s fraud rules, which may incorporate over 600 data points, such as transaction patterns or the cardholder's history.

Based on the analysis, PRP returns a "DENY" recommendation to Galileo’s core authorization processing engine. The transaction is declined before it completes, reducing the bank's fraud exposure and minimizing dispute-handling costs, even though the cardholder experiences some friction due to the denial.

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Note

PRP provides fraud-decision recommendations—it does not decline or approve a transaction by itself. Regardless of PRP’s fraud-decision recommendations, Galileo-processing clients have the option to override PRP’s decision recommendations in real time when using the Auth API.