About Payment Risk Platform

Galileo’s multi-layered approach to fraud mitigation expertly combines the power of people, technology, and data, with access to Galileo’s trained fraud analysts for comprehensive fraud-mitigation strategies. The Payment Risk Platform (PRP) enables you to configure risk rules to block fraudulent events in real time and address complex fraud challenges. In addition to its real-time fraud detection capabilities, PRP regularly receives and analyzes post-transaction data as feedback, including fraud and disputes, within the Galileo ecosystem to assess operational and transactional fraud risks, enabling you to save an average of 35%* in fraud losses.

PRP targets every corner of the payments ecosystem by utilizing Galileo risk insights for in-depth risk and fraud knowledge and experience, a real-time decision rules engine, and backtesting capability. PRP supports Galileo products including debit and credit cards, BNPL, bank account linking events, and money movement transactions. You also have the option to use a comprehensive, self-service environment, coupled with a case-management system for manual fraud reviews and a knowledge graph for fraud ring investigations.

PRP is a standalone product offering. It can operate independently of or in conjunction with any other Galileo products or software based on simple configuration changes. You work closely with Galileo to design and utilize PRPs features to meet your business needs.

See the Managed vs. self-service PRP section to determine the best option for your business.

_{*Based on a review of Galileo clients using Galileo fraud mitigation services - conducted in July 2022 and November 2022.}

Features and capabilities

Payment Risk Platform consists of a number of best-in-class features to help you monitor and analyze fraud, and systematically adapt your fraud policy to block risky transactions. Payment Risk Platform can also receive the enriched data elements from Galileo Instant Verification Engine into the Risk Feature Store and you can construct your own fraud policy with your finger tips. The following is a list of the platform’s capabilities:

• Measure customer transaction behavior — Galileo’s Feature Platform enables you to create your own features to measure the riskiness of customer transaction behavior and use them in your fraud policy. You also can leverage Galileo proprietary features within their rules and fraud policy. See the Feature Platform section of Payment Risk Platform Core Features to learn more.

• Configure fraud rules and strategies — The Decision Rules Engine monitors and decides on transactions to identify potential fraudulent activity, simulates and tests new strategies, and provides a simple way to deploy fraud strategies. See the Decision Rules Engine section of Payment Risk Platform Core Features to learn more.

• Actively manage your fraud cases — The Case Management System allows you to get alerts, analyze cases, and manage queues. You can also take bulk actions on fraud rings, decisioning, and provide detailed reason codes and the history of actions and changes. See the Case Management System section of Payment Risk Platform Core Features to learn more.

• Analyze transaction risk scoring — Galileo’s propriety fraud model provides a risk score you can utilize in your fraud policy. Galileo’s machine learning (ML) model is designed for financial technology companies whose transaction and customer base may differ from those of the larger financial institutions. See About Card Transaction GScore for more details.

• Visualize fraudulent transactions and behaviors in your ecosystem — Knowledge Graph is a visual linkage analysis tool available to understand the trends in your ecosystem, identify potential fraud rings (e.g. risky cardholders are connected and merchants are high risk).

• Identify common points of compromise — The Common Point of Compromise (CPC) solution helps identify common touchpoints suspected of compromise by analyzing transactional history and correlating them with reported fraudulent activities. Galileo performs the analysis monthly to help you identify and take the necessary actions associated with common points of compromise.

• Direct support from Galileo’s fraud team — Galileo can assist you in fraud rule strategy development, fraud investigations, analyses, ad-hoc requests, etc.

Managed vs. self-service PRP

Galileo provides both a managed service for the fraud policy execution and a self-service environment. Depending on your program size and your team’s expertise, you can leverage Galileo’s skilled Fraud Ops team to add, modify, and optimize your fraud policy on PRP or your team can have direct access to PRP to make fraud policy adjustment and operations. Read on to learn more about the managed service and self-service options.

Managed service

With managed PRP, Galileo acts as an extension of your business — providing direct support to manage your fraud policy in PRP. This is recommended for financial institutions that do not have fraud operations or your existing teams have bandwidth constraints. Galileo fraud agents monitor the historical fraud trends and recommend fraud policy adjustments to continuously enhance your risk management. Your fraud policy is owned by you and any recommended policy changes must be reviewed and approved by you before executed on PRP.

Self-service

With self-service, you are enabled to manage your fraud policy in the Payment Risk Platform using the Risk API. This includes the ability to analyze the fraud trends, run a back-testing, add and/or modify fraud rules, and publish changes to fraud rules. Galileo provides training sessions and materials for your team to learn how to successfully manage your risk and fraud rules in PRP.

Use cases

These use cases provide examples of how different PRP features can benefit a fraud manager of a fintech company who is responsible for monitoring fraud patterns, performing fraud investigations, and making changes in the fraud policy to systematically block risky transactions.

Use case 1: Detect abnormal transaction behaviors

A financial institution utilizes PRP to safeguard their customer’s accounts by continuously monitoring transactions. On a typical business day, transactions are received and processed without any issues. However, at 2:30 PM, the system registers a significant and sudden spike in transaction volumes.

PRP’s velocity feature immediately identifies this unusual pattern and raises an alert with a list of the affected accounts, as well as the transaction details, count, and velocity, and the recommended action to take. The alert data indicates that the spike involved a high number of transactions, which is unusual for this time of day. Additionally, none of the transactions appear to have typical authorization codes or descriptions, but the transaction amounts are consistent with normal transactions, making it less likely to be a simple error. Based on their fraud policy and their risk appetite, PRP sends a signal to temporarily freeze the account, then recommends contacting the affected customers to verify which of the transactions were legitimate and which were fraudulent. From there, they take the appropriate actions, including suppressing fraud rules for the customer to retry a transaction and reissuing the card upon customer’s confirmation of card compromise.

Use case 2: Detect potentially compromised merchants

A retail banking organization relies on the PRP to identify and mitigate risks associated with potentially compromised merchants. On a busy shopping weekend, PRP observes an unusual surge in credit card transactions at a particular electronics store from multiple customers across different states. This rapid pattern of high-value purchases triggers an alert within the system.

PRP’s advanced algorithms analyze these transactions and assign a risk score to each associated entity. PRP also employs the Common Point of Compromise (CPC) to identify and analyze the electronics stores as potential points of compromise. This information is used to quickly isolate these transactions and block further purchases from the identified merchants, as well as generate a report that lists all active accounts that have interacted with these merchants to conduct a focused investigation. From there, the bank reaches out to the affected cardholders to confirm their transactions, helping to differentiate between legitimate purchases and fraudulent activities. Through these swift actions, the retail banking organization not only prevents further fraudulent transactions but also aids in broader fraud investigations, ultimately safeguarding both their assets and their customers’ financial security.

Use case 3: Use data points to queue risky transactions

A multinational e-commerce company integrates PRP to enhance their transaction monitoring capabilities. Despite having a robust online transaction system, the company faces challenges in identifying and managing high-risk transactions, especially during peak shopping seasons. To address this, the company's fraud prevention team decides to leverage PRP's self-service platform to set up a more nuanced approach for handling risky transactions.

Utilizing the PRP self-service platform, the team configures a series of parameters to queue transactions that exhibit suspicious characteristics. During a major sale event, PRP detects an unusually high volume of transactions from newly created accounts, all purchasing high-value items. The risk scoring mechanism, combined with merchant and account velocity features, highlights these transactions as high-risk. The queued transactions are reviewed by the program’s fraud prevention team, who scrutinize each transaction’s details, such as account creation date, transaction amount, and frequency of purchases. Based on this analysis, the fraud prevention team categorizes the transactions: legitimate transactions are processed, while suspicious transactions are added to a greylist for closer monitoring or a blacklist for immediate blocking.

This proactive approach enables the e-commerce company to mitigate potential fraud while minimizing disruption to genuine customers, ensuring a secure and trustworthy shopping experience.

Use case 4: Get performance data for fraud policies

A leading online banking service utilizes PRP to continuously refine and enhance their fraud detection strategies.

The online banking service regularly reviews the Risk Dashboard as part of the PRP service offerings, utilizing its sophisticated analytical platform to analyze extensive fraud data. This enables their security team to receive Galileo Risk Data Mart, which provides detailed insights into fraud incidents and patterns specific to their operation.

Additionally, the bank schedules routine consultations with Galileo to discuss and refine their fraud strategy based on these insights. During these meetings, the team reviews the performance of existing fraud policies, gaining valuable recommendations on optimizing risk features and policy adjustments. The AI and ML models employed are continuously monitored and re-trained with the latest data as necessary, ensuring that the banking service stays ahead of recent changes in fraud patterns. Furthermore, the benefits from aggregated trend analyses within the Galileo ecosystem, enabling them to continuously adjust strategies against the recent industry trends.
This comprehensive approach not only bolsters their ability to combat fraud but also enhances the security and trust of their customers in their digital banking services.

Galileo setup

Contact Galileo to inquire about setup and initiate your fraud-strategy consultation sessions. Prior to deployment, work with Galileo to test PRP in the CV environment on your behalf.

If you want to use a third-party risk vendor as part of your fraud policy, ask Galileo to assess the vendor to provide their risk assessment within PRP.