How the Risk Management service works

When a shopper makes a purchase, the pre-authorisation Risk Management checks are run. These checks are completed in less than a second, so there is virtually no delay for your shoppers. A pre-authorisation risk result is calculated at this point.

If the transaction contains any element that appears in a referral list (maintained by you or Worldpay), then processing is stopped and the shopper's payment attempt does not continue. The transaction is given a payment status of REFUSED, which is reported in the Merchant Interface and in an email we send to you (if this has been set). The shopper is shown a result page that indicates the transaction was not processed. The shopper is told they may try again or use a different card.

Authorisation checks

For all other transactions, our payment service makes a request of the card issuer for an authorisation, an Address Verification (AVS), and a Card Security Code (CVC/CVV) check.

The card issuer returns the authorisation results together with the AVS and CVC/CVV results. These results are added to the final calculations made by our Risk Management service.

If the fraud risk is calculated to be at one of the pre-defined levels set by Worldpay, then a 'Warning' or 'Caution' alert is returned. An alert is returned whether a transaction is authorised or refused by the card issuer and is reported in the Merchant Interface, the HTML Payment Response (Callback) and in the email we send you (if this has been set).

If the payment is authorised by the card issuer and the fraud risk is calculated to be below the pre-defined alert levels set by Worldpay, then our Risk Management service indicates a no risk result or ‘OK’ is returned depending on where the results are viewed.