Glossary
Risk score
A risk score is a number, often from 0 to 100 or 0 to 1, that a fraud engine assigns to a payment to say how likely it is to be fraudulent or disputed, based on the card, the payer's device and behaviour, the address, the merchant's history and the engine's past fraud. Scores come from the issuer's own engine in the authorisation decision, from the acquirer's or provider's screening, and from specialist vendors; a threshold turns the score into approve, challenge or decline.
Signals behind a score
Velocity and history of the card and the device; distance between the IP, the billing and the shipping address; e-mail age and domain; time of day; amount against the merchant’s profile; links to known fraud; the result of previous authentications. Models trained on one merchant category misjudge another, so vendors offer per-merchant tuning.
Using scores well
Treat the score as one input to rules: challenge with 3-D Secure in the middle band rather than declining; keep the band per merchant and method; watch the approval rate and the chargeback ratio together when a threshold moves; and keep the score with the payment so that disputes and declines can be explained later.
On the platform
Tranzify records the risk answers and scores that acquirers and providers return with each attempt, applies the client’s deterministic rules on amount, BIN, country and limits before routing, and uses 3-D Secure where the rule or the issuer asks; a client that uses a scoring vendor acts on its score in its own rules.
Updated: 2026-11-08