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02 / Payments / Risk governance / Product

Merchant risk. Connected to evidence.

Designed and built a merchant-risk governance platform implemented by payment service providers. It connects onboarding declarations, risk decisions and monitoring controls through a traceable record of policies, approvals and evidence.

Explore the work
Client context
Payment service providers
My role
Founder, product owner and technical lead
Scope
Implemented by payment service providers
01 / CONTEXT

The situation.

When onboarding declarations, risk decisions and monitoring controls live in separate systems, the reasoning between them can be lost. A reviewer may see a risk score without its explanation, or a monitoring threshold without a clear record of why it was approved. Reconstructing a past decision becomes a separate investigation.

My responsibility

I developed the product from the underlying problem through architecture, implementation and deployment. My responsibilities covered product ownership, the data model, backend services, merchant and reviewer workflows, security and operations. The platform has been implemented by payment service providers.

02 / JUDGMENT

The decisions
behind the work.

  1. Make risk decisions explainable

    Build deterministic scoring from rules and weights the payment service provider controls. Preserve the answers and policy version behind each score, and separate generated recommendations from approved decisions.

  2. Connect onboarding to monitoring

    Turn merchant declarations into a typed, versioned profile. Link that profile to approved controls, deployment records and observed behaviour. Changes to the baseline pass through review, preserving the rationale for each decision.

  3. Preserve the evidence behind the decision

    Design point-in-time reconstruction so reviewers can examine the file as it stood on a chosen date. Control and audit access to evidence, isolate tenant data and keep document scanning within an operator-controlled environment. An unavailable check is recorded as unavailable.

A CLOSER LOOK

Keep the reasoning connected.

An illustration of the approach.

Merchant profileApproved controlsEvidence and history

Follow the evidence back through the policy and approval history to understand the file at a chosen date.

Conceptual illustration · Client systems are not shown.

03 / OUTCOME

What the work
made possible.

Payment service providers have implemented the platform to connect merchant onboarding and monitoring governance. It brings the declaration, applicable policy, approved control and supporting evidence into a traceable record. Reviewers can follow the reasoning behind a decision and reconstruct the relevant state of a merchant file at a chosen point in time.

Implemented
By payment service providers
Traceable
Policies, controls and evidence
Reconstructable
Decisions at a point in time

THE NEXT CONVERSATION

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