Overview
Four products sit under Risk Management. They differ in what they inspect and how you integrate with them.
| Product | What it looks at | How you use it | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Risk Controls | Transactions you process through us | Configured in the merchant portal; no API changes | 3DSecure, AVS/CV2, velocity rules and negative lists applied at authorisation |
| Optimize Evaluate and Manage | Transactions you process through us | Decision returned on your existing payment response | Rules and lists score each payment in real time, and deferred payments become tasks in the Manage queue |
| Optimize Direct Evaluate and Manage | Any transaction, including ones we do not process | Separate verify and fraud-event API calls | The same decisioning as Evaluate, but decoupled from payment processing |
| Optimize Verify | People, not payments | Standalone API and portal | Identity and data enrichment from third-party vendors — KYC, document, address and open banking checks |
Choosing between them
Risk Controls is the built-in baseline: switch the checks on in the Configuration area of the merchant portal and they are enforced on every card transaction on that installation. There is nothing to integrate.
Optimize Evaluate adds rule-based decisioning to the payments you already send us. The decision comes back on the authorisation response, and anything deferred rather than accepted or declined lands in Optimize Manage, a workflow queue in the merchant portal where your fraud team accepts or rejects it.
Optimize Direct Evaluate is the same decisioning offered as a standalone service, for transactions we do not process — including non-card payment methods. You call the verify endpoint to get a decision, and Optimize Direct Manage gives you the API equivalent of the Manage queue: publish fraud events, receive task notifications, and complete or retrieve tasks.
Optimize Verify is not transaction decisioning at all. It verifies the person: one API call runs a configured profile of third-party data services and returns enriched data with summaries. It can be used on its own or alongside the Optimize decisioning products.