Elavon Loss Prevention: A look behind the scenes

Protecting payment card transactions against fraud and other acceptance losses is always a top priority. Elavon utilizes our network’s extensive fraud monitoring and control features through both our products and our loss prevention operations. At the core is a robust set of our risk-management and fraud-prevention tools via the Global Risk Tool (GRT).

GRT is our third-party risk management tool utilizing Mastercard’s Brighterion AI that features artificial intelligence and machine learning to support fraud-detection models and rules scoring—in turn, identifying potentially risky transactions. It contains sets of parameters that help identify risk prior to and post merchant transaction funding, as well as a model rule-based engine and business rules that trigger merchant risk situations for review by our team of investigative analysts.

Our team of more than 80 employees works to protect the integrity of authorized and settled transactions and prevent losses from everything from stolen credit cards and fraudulent accounts to employee embezzlement and other scams. Coupled with advanced analytics technology and a solid working relationship with the card brands, Elavon reviews 200 to 300 stopped transactions and investigates an average of 1,200 suspicious transactions daily.

As a result of these collaborative efforts, Elavon averted $84 million in losses in 2023 and identified an additional $17 million in transactional activities that posed potential financial risk to Elavon and our merchant customers.

Finding—and stopping— potential losses fast
We see loss-mitigation opportunities pop up in various ways. While most of those opportunities are tied to fraud against merchants, there are other less-common risks and fraud scenarios. Those include card-brand fines, fees and assessments, merchant employee embezzlement and payment acceptance errors. One example is when a cardholder refund is presented in error. We’ve seen this twice recently. In one case, the erroneous refunds totaled $150,000, while the second instance involved a miskeyed refund for over $4 million. In both instances, the transactions were stopped and mitigated by our Loss Prevention Team.

Educating the innocent
While merchants are obligated to monitor and manage their own risk of loss within their card and payment acceptance environment, our Loss Prevention Team also works side-by-side with our merchants to address potential risks created by innocent merchant employee errors or unethical employees and the latest fraud-enabling technologies.