Risk decisions
Risk decisions turn risk signals into an executable instruction. Step-up, hold or block is evaluated against your own thresholds. Scoring runs only on safe payment context such as amount, currency, method and network-level signals. There is no card data, no customer identity and no black-box verdict, and every decision carries reason codes.
Binary approve-or-decline, decided in the dark
Risk handling is usually either a hard decline or a silent approve, driven by scattered rules or an opaque vendor score nobody can explain. There is no graduated response, no step-up when friction is warranted, no hold when a human should look, and no auditable reason why a payment was treated the way it was.
Graduated instructions against your thresholds
- 01Safe context inPOST /v1/decision carries amount, currency, method and network-level signals. Strict schemas reject card data and customer identity at the boundary.
- 02Scored against your policyThe risk engine evaluates the payment against the thresholds you set in policy. Policy is cached on the hot path, so scoring adds no provider calls.
- 03A graduated instruction backInstead of a bare score you get step-up, hold or block, or a routing instruction when risk is acceptable, always with reason codes.
- 04Prove it in shadow firstRun shadow mode to see what risk decisions would have been made on real traffic before any of them are enforced.
The products behind it
Every solution is the same four-part architecture doing its job. These are the parts doing the heavy lifting here.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about risk decisions with Payinference.
No. The API accepts only safe payment context, such as amount, currency, country, payment method and network-level signals. Request schemas are strict and reject PANs, CVVs and customer identity at the boundary, so card data cannot enter the system even by accident.
In shadow mode Payinference returns decisions and records what it would have done while your existing logic keeps executing, so you can evaluate decision quality against real traffic with zero risk. In enforce mode your stack executes the returned instruction.
Deciding what should happen to a payment before it touches a rail. Payinference evaluates provider health, cost, risk and your merchant policy in real time and turns them into a single instruction with reason codes, so routing, retries, step-ups and blocks are deliberate, explainable decisions instead of static defaults.