Coris is building merchant risk infrastructure for leading software companies and payment facilitators. Our customers offer complex services to millions of small businesses, and they need an easy way to segment and keep track of the unique types of merchant activities that arise.

Today, we’re launching account tags to address this gap. Now, risk teams can assign merchant accounts custom tags in order to make their risk strategies much more effective and improve risk reporting and monitoring processes.

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What is a merchant account?

At Coris, we gather SMB data based on three tiers of entities: the legal entity, the business establishment, and the merchant account. A legal entity can have multiple business establishments doing business under it. Likewise, a business establishment can have multiple merchant accounts registered with their software platform.

For example, consider a car dealership. A car dealer in southern California will have one legal entity under which it is operating. Within this entity, it might have one or multiple businesses (perhaps for different brands). These businesses, in turn, might have multiple merchant accounts registered with their car dealership software. One account might be for onsite services (like oil changes), another for car parts sold onsite, and another for car parts sold online. Each account tracks different transactions, and thus their risks are unique. Software platforms need an easy way to differentiate between these accounts and monitor special cases in one place.

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Uniform monitoring misses key risk nuances

As mentioned above, merchant accounts carry varying types of risk, but risk teams have traditionally monitored them all in the same way. Typically, risk teams review all accounts in their case management tool on a fixed time basis (e.g. every 90 or 180 days). If an analyst wants to keep track of special reminders or insights about an account, they will track these in a separate spreadsheet or add a reminder in their calendar. This disparate information tracking system opens up the opportunity to miss critical risk signals, lack of continuity in operations, and can allow otherwise preventable forms of fraud to go unnoticed. 

Alternatively, some risk teams might request engineers to build out custom tracking capabilities, but this can lead to long lead times and resourcing tradeoffs.

Many customers have pointed out the drawbacks of this disparate tracking process and lack of customization. We decided to build a solution that centralizes account monitoring and offers a flexible, no-code way to develop account labels.

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Custom account labels, without engineering constraints

Account Tags allow risk teams to create and assign custom labels to merchant accounts in order to better differentiate and seamlessly monitor different types of activity. Account tags are flexible and highly configurable – analysts can create an unlimited number of account tags across four different data types: boolean (true/false), string (text data), date/time, and number values.

How does it work?

• Set up: Teams can create custom account labels in the “Account Tags Manager” page on the Coris platform. Account tags can be implemented at the account level, the business establishment level, or the legal entity level. If established at the legal entity or business level, all entities underneath it will inherit the account tags as well. 
• Case Management: As analysts review cases, they can choose to apply any of the account tags they created in the Manager dashboard to a specific account. Analysts can apply as many tags to an account as they want, and remove account tags on an account at any point. 
• Fuzio: Account tags can be used as a signal within Fuzio’s rule engine to trigger customized reviews on accounts. They can also help reduce the false positive problem: they surface contextual data for accounts in a structured way (vs. being buried in notes), giving analysts a more comprehensive picture of account activity and allowing analysts to override unnecessary alerts.

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Use cases

• Monitor accounts by analyst: If a risk analyst wants to own the review of a particular account for the foreseeable future, they can create a boolean account tag with their name and check this tag  on the account.
• Keep track of special accounts: Account types can help segment accounts based on key business characteristics, such as strategic accounts (that might require higher quality support) or accounts nearing bankruptcy. These can be set up using the string account tag type.
• Revisit accounts at a specific time: If a risk analyst notices an account has exhibited unusual payment activity, they can tag the account for another review in a few weeks by using the date/time account tag type or the number account tag type. This will allow the analyst to determine whether the activity is one-off or indicative of a broader issue with the account.

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Want to learn more?

We’re constantly improving our platform to become the one-stop-shop for critical merchant risk infrastructure needs. If you’d like to learn more about Coris or get started with Account Tags, contact us.