Coris is modernizing risk infrastructure for the world’s fastest growing SaaS companies and payment facilitators (PayFacs). As part of this mission, we’ve already shortened manual review times with automated case management, and have made it easier to aggregate merchant data through our Stripe integration. 

Today, we’re excited to expand on this vision with Fuzio. As the first “operating system” (OS) for merchant risk, it centralizes risk management and empowers teams to automate monotonous tasks. Review, decide, and act on merchant risk, all in one place.

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Absence of a platform built for merchant risk 

Merchant risk management hasn’t been addressed by existing tools. While there are several general SMB risk management tools on the market, they lack the specific data sources and integrations to understand merchants holistically. For example, none of the existing risk management tools in the market integrate with Stripe (Coris is one of the first). Stripe is a critical source of data on merchant payment volumes.

Given the complexity of managing merchant risk and the absence of the right tools, SaaS companies and PayFacs have resorted to an ad hoc approach to identify and mitigate risk: 

• Search for merchant information on search engines
• Download data on merchants from external data sources (Stripe, Snowflake, Redshift, etc.)
• Run custom SQL queries or apply filters in Google Sheets to assess merchant riskiness 
• Enact decisions on disparate platforms that don’t speak to each other
• Communicate with merchants idiosyncratically via Salesforce, Hubspot, or even just email application
• Execute sporadic reporting and feedback, often forgoing tracking completely

This manual approach occurs across each checkpoint in the merchant lifecycle – from onboarding to ongoing monitoring – without a concrete paper trail. This at scale can really slow risk teams down, leading to long onboarding approval times and high rates of false positives. It also creates double work: since teams don’t have a deduping mechanism or paper trail, they unknowingly review the same merchant multiple times.

Rule engines can streamline these processes by automatically implementing business rules and actions. A few teams have built risk rule engines in-house, but these are usually deprecated over time because they require significant engineering investments to reach table stakes functionality.

Fuzio: Centralized, automated risk OS

Fuzio takes the grunt work out of risk management through a 3-part approach:

1. Data consolidation: Get real-time data on merchants via Coris’s Merchant Profiler, and pull in existing data on merchants via integrations with Stripe, Snowflake, and Redshift.
2. No-code rule engine: Set up custom risk rules and actions to flag merchant behavior. Teams can check for multiple rules, and rules can be associated with Coris Merchant Profiler data (e.g. GPT4-powered MCC classification, website traffic, 3rd party reviews from Google / Yelp), Stripe (e.g. elevated chargebacks or refunds), or internal platform data (e.g., customer tenure, past due subscription payments). 
3. Risk decisioning and automated actions: Automatically execute actions or forward cases to manual review if certain rules are met. Actions can reduce friction (e.g., auto-approving merchant applicants who pass onboarding rules) or add checkpoints (e.g., reviewing merchants with volatile payment volumes). Fuzio can also execute actions on external platforms such as Stripe if it has write permission. Check out our Stripe integration for more details.

By streamlining risk operations, Fuzio enables the following business objectives: 

• Accelerate onboarding time for “good” merchants
• Reduce the number of false positives and manual reviews
• Facilitate higher quality decisions through information consolidation
• Build better risk models, which can drive down fraud losses

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Applicable across the merchant lifecycle

Onboarding

When a merchant goes through Stripe onboarding using Stripe Connect Custom, risk teams can leverage Fuzio to run various real-time checks. For example, what’s their website professionalism rating based on signals like website traffic, domain status, accepted payment methods, etc.? Does the business address they submitted match the address appearing in government filings and search engines? What are consumers saying about them on Google and Yelp? If the merchant passes these checks, they can automatically be approved for the SaaS platform. If they don’t, they can be forwarded to case management for manual review.

Ongoing monitoring

Once a merchant is on the platform, risk teams will want to develop a picture of the merchant’s steady-state behavior and keep tabs on any suspicious activity. Fuzio enables teams to set custom thresholds for key signals such as monthly refund rates, chargeback rates, higher payment volumes than usual, etc. If a merchant exceeds a threshold, they can be examined more closely through manual review.

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Want to learn more?

We’re actively building out the Coris platform to make it a one-stop-shop for merchant risk management. We’ll soon be releasing more exciting updates to Fuzio, including AI-enhanced functionality, more data providers, and more.

If you’d like to learn more or want to get started with Coris, contact us.