Payment Optimization
3 min
Within Universal Fraud APIs, Payment Optimization guidance is returned as part of the preAuth response and refined through post-authorization feedback data submitted through update workflows.
Payment Optimization helps clients determine:
- When to invoke authentication
- How to apply authentication strategies
- How to balance fraud risk, authorization success, and processing costs
The solution operates by combining:
- Transaction event data
- Historical issuer intelligence
- Real-time risk signals
Note: Payment Optimization does not execute authentication. It provides decision-support outputs that downstream systems use to determine authentication behavior.
Operational Flow
Payment Optimization operates across four stages:
- Universal Fraud API preAuth request
- Optimization and decisioning
- preAuth response guidance
- Authorization execution by merchant/acquirer
- Universal Fraud API authorization update
- Continuous optimization learning
All stages are required to enable continuous optimization.
Core Modules
Payment Optimization consists of three core modules:
- Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) Optimization
- 3D-Secure (3DS) Optimization
- Risk-Based Authentication (RBA)
Each module supports a different aspect of authentication strategy based on regulatory requirements, issuer behavior, and regional considerations.