GoCardless Protect+
Please note: GoCardless Protect+ is currently only available to merchants on the Pro plan with customers who have bank accounts in the UK, US, Germany, or France. If you meet these requirements and are interested in using this product, please reach out to your account manager.
When GoCardless Protect+ is enabled, the features available to you may vary depending on which features are supported for your country and direct debit scheme. Please see here for more detail.
When users attempt to commit fraud, these attempts can be costly to our merchants and their genuine customers.
To tackle this problem, GoCardless is launching our new anti-fraud solution, GoCardless Protect+, to help our merchants detect and prevent fraud of all kinds.
What is Payment Fraud?
There are three different types of payment fraud that GoCardless has identified:
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Identity fraud: The customer uses bank account details that don’t belong to them.
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No intent to pay: The customer uses a valid bank account but no funds are transferred to the merchant. This might be caused by a lack of funds, or mandate cancellations after a short period of time of the setup.
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Unfair chargebacks: The customer uses a valid bank account but payments are charged back after using the service.
How can GoCardless help?
GoCardless Protect+ uses our payment intelligence to protect against fraud of all kinds.
GoCardless has been processing bank debit payments for over a decade, giving us industry-leading payment intelligence data. This data is based on tens of billions of dollars worth of payments, including payments across 37 countries.
Using this data, GoCardless Protect+ takes a 4-pronged approach to tackle payer fraud:
Detect - Predicting riskiness of customers when they are signing up
GoCardless assesses the riskiness of payers with a set of custom rules and our machine learning model. Our custom rules categorise events registered against a payer - things like “has there ever been a payment failure or a chargeback associated with this payer”.
The more complex rules are captured by our machine learning model, which is trained based on a variety of inputs. The combination of the two allows GoCardless to assign risk to each payer, which you can use to determine how to deal with them.
Blocklists
Oftentimes it’s the same fraudulent payers who sign up repeatedly that conduct identity fraud, no intent to pay, or chargeback fraud. You can now block these fraudulent payers at the point of sign up.
You can use Blocklists to block certain customers based on their bank account, email address, or email domain.
For more information on Blocklists, please see Blocklists FAQ and our API Documentation on the Blocks core endpoint.
Verify - If the payer looks risky, put them through Verified Mandates to verify account ownership
When the Detect engine identifies that a payer exceeds the fraud protection level you've set, GoCardless Protect+ sends them through the Verified Mandates flow, to further verify that the payer has access to the account they are attempting to use.
Verified Mandates
Verified Mandates provides you the peace of mind that your customers are who they say they are. When setting up a new mandate, we’ll help customers automatically log in to their online banking to confirm their information. If everything checks out, your customers are verified and you can view their verification status on the dashboard:
Without GoCardless Protect+, you can still use Verified Mandates by enabling the Verified Mandates feature on a standalone basis. You can choose to verify all payers, verify only when Verified Mandates is available for the payer’s scheme, or only when it is required by the scheme. However, when GoCardless Protect+ is also enabled, you can have our Detect engine intelligently decide when a bank account should be verified.
Please note: If you use Billing Request Flows, you can choose to implement Verified Mandates on its own or combined with the rest of GoCardless Protect+. If you use Redirect Flows, you can only use Verified Mandates as a part of the rest of GoCardless Protect+. This means Protect+ will only put riskier payers through a Verified Mandate (our recommended flow).
For more information on Verified Mandates, please see Verified Mandates and Verified Mandates FAQs.
Monitor - Reporting on fraudulent activity
Custom reporting on fraudulent activity
With GoCardless Protect+, you will have access to an in-dashboard Monitoring page that will show the potential fraud that has been detected in your customers in the last 6 months. With this data, you can:
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Access the latest data and reports on suspected fraudulent activity on your account
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Access data on the performance of GoCardless Protect+ features:
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Estimated fraud prevented through your risk settings (this data will be available after 2 months of usage of Verified Mandates)
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Monetary value of chargebacks recovered
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For more information on the Monitoring component, please see Monitoring and Monitoring FAQs.
Challenge - Challenge fraudulent chargebacks
Challenge chargebacks
A chargeback – also referred to as a “reversal” or a "claim" – is when Direct Debit funds used to make a purchase are returned to the buyer.
Due to Direct Debit customer protections offered by bank debit schemes, chargebacks are always a possibility but may not always be fair. While our Detect and Verify components reduce the incidence of fraud and consequently result in fewer chargebacks, fraudulent chargebacks can still happen. To tackle this, GoCardless will challenge these chargebacks on your behalf.
From the Chargebacks page in the dashboard, you can view all chargebacks and select any that you would like to challenge. GoCardless will work with you to collect the evidence required to challenge the chargebacks, which we will send to the banks. You can monitor the challenge status from within the dashboard.
For more information on Challenge Chargebacks, please visit here.