Merchant acquiring and e-commerce as an industry are fraught with risk—but not all risks are obvious. Navigating card scheme rules, local and federal regulations, and best practices developed for your business’ specific risk appetite can be a tangled mess.
As prepared as you may be to navigate these risks, the merchants within your portfolio can inadvertently step out of compliance without knowing it, and more importantly—without notifying you. Comprehensive monitoring of changes to merchant URLs is necessary for identifying merchants who have gone out of compliance with card network rules, whether on purpose or by accident.
The first step in effectively monitoring changes to merchant websites is controlling how much information you see. Websites continually make large numbers of small changes, many driven by automated processes associated with domain maintenance. Generally, these high-volume, automated changes do not represent any risk indicators.
Manual changes to websites are also continuous, high-volume, and represent a wide range of activity, including:
Product and copy updates
Blogs, new releases, and other resource materials
Customer evidence, reviews, logos, and case studies
Pricing and policy updates
and more
Staying apprised of all changes is possible, but it comes at a high cost. Manually reviewing minutiae drains resources and distracts teams from more high-value work.
Automation is key to filtering out irrelevant website updates, but even after automated changes are removed, you’re left with high volumes of hits that land in a gray area requiring human review. So, do you create that automation in-house and hire a team, or do you outsource it?
An expert partner can detect changes to merchant websites efficiently. Look for:
Filtering methods for high-volume, automated changes.
Configurable reports to reduce unnecessary alerts.
Industry knowledge of which changes pose the most risk in different industries.
Expertise to help you action alerts.
Building or partnering with a solution based on these organizing principles will help you stay apprised of your merchants’ activities without overwhelming you with noise. Concise, actionable updates are the key to having timely and direct conversations with both your merchants and the card brands to ensure that you are capitalizing on all opportunities without exposing yourself to unnecessary risk.
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