How Bolt's Risk Assessment Scoring Helps Retailers Make More Informed Fraud Decisions

The recent flurry of ecommerce fraud has <a href="https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/ecommerce-losses-online-payment-fraud-exceed-20bn">cost retailers billions of dollars in losses each year.</a> To help retailers make more informed decisions about fraud, we launched Risk Assessment Scoring, a modern solution for scoring the risks associated with credit card transactions.&nbsp;The solution puts the power of Bolt's fraud protection system in the hands of more retailers and, over time, makes them forget about that <a href="https://www.bolt.com/landing/2022-ecommerce-fraud-report">costly five-letter word</a>.&nbsp;<a href="https://merchant.bolt.com/">Check out your risk assessment scores in the merchant dashboard</a><h2>What is Risk Assessment Scoring?</h2>Fraud prevention has always been at the heart of our offerings. And as cybercriminals evolve, so too have our solutions in protecting our customers from undue losses. Making Risk Assessment Scoring available to all merchants is just our next step in this journey.&nbsp;The tool analyzes individual credit transactions to determine your potential risks and surface a risk score in the Bolt Merchant Dashboard, as well as all the factors that make up a risk score. We do this by feeding hundreds of real-time indicators that we've found signify fraudulent behavior into a machine learning model. Some factors we consider are:&nbsp;<ul><li>whether an email had been used in the past</li><li>when the last time we saw a particular IP address</li><li>and much more.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li></ul>All these calculations happen behind the scenes. What <a href="https://help.bolt.com/merchants/references/dashboard-features/risk-scoring/">you end up seeing is a score ranging from 0 to 1000</a>. A risk score between 0 and 500 means a particular transaction poses a minimal threat, and as the score increases, so does the risk of fraud. And if anything is unclear, we provide a detailed view into why an individual transaction received a particular score. That way, you can minimize your fraud exposure while approving more good orders.<h2>Who benefits from Risk Assessment Scoring?</h2>In the past, we had offered Risk Assessment Scoring as part of our Fraud Protections product, which included Risk Assessment Scoring, our <a href="https://www.bolt.com/fraud-protection">Fraud Chargeback Guarantee</a>, and Bolt's qualitative review team.&nbsp;But as a pioneer in <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/what-is-headless-commerce">headless commerce</a>, the ability to pick and choose services that best suit your needs, we are making Risk Assessment Scoring a standalone feature. You can now access our proprietary scoring system without signing up for Bolt Fraud Protection.&nbsp;That way, if you already have a fraud provider or only need a lightweight solution, you aren't paying for duplicate services.&nbsp;&nbsp;And the best part: risk assessment scoring is free for Bolt merchant accounts. Starting with retailers on ecommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, you will now be able to enjoy risk insights at their fingertips so they can make more informed risk decisions and fully own their customer relationships.&nbsp;Headless fraud prevention is a seismic shift from just five years ago, when out-of-the-box solutions were the only way to protect your business from fraud. Today you can build a fraud prevention toolkit that best suits your needs, starting with our stand-alone Risk Assessment Scoring.<a href="https://merchant.bolt.com/">Check out your risk assessment scores in the merchant dashboard</a>