Requesting and handling recommendations

Alongside your payment fraud integration, there are two extra things to consider for transaction optimisation:

1. Requesting recommendations
   Make sure you send us important transaction and payment method details. We will return a recommendation to authenticate or authorise with or without an exemption or 3DS challenge preference where applicable.

2. Update us with authentication and authorisation attempts
   Make sure you update us at the end of the transaction about these attempts.

Requesting recommendations

A transaction optimisation recommendation can be requested by sending a request to the Checkout Endpoint and adding the transactionOptimisation=true query parameter to the end of the request’s URL. This must be used in addition to the score query parameter for specifying a Checkpoint.

For example: /v2/checkout?score=checkoutPreAuth&transactionOptimisation=true

This request must be sent before starting authentication or authorisation.

These are the important fields to send in the recommendation request:

We only provide transaction optimisation routing recommendations if the paymentMethod.methodType is set to card. This is because other transaction types may be out of PSD2 scope, have Strong Customer Authentication built in already (e.g. Apple Pay), or do not support 3D Secure. Our recommendations are based around 3DS used as the mechanism to support SCA.

We will return a recommendation to either perform authentication or proceed directly to authorisation. A Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) exemption and 3DS challenge preference will be returned if applicable. The response will be appended to the payment fraud recommendation, with optimised recommendations being provided only to transactions that we believe are low risk.

Our recommendations will be driven by different sources:

• Machine Learning: This will drive the majority of our recommendations for optimisable traffic.
• Rules: You can request that Ravelin configure rules to be applied to optimisable traffic. However, we strongly recommend that recommendations be driven by our ML for optimisation purposes.
• Compliance Logic: This will help identify traffic which cannot be optimised, as well as help keep you compliant with PSD2 SCA.

See the Checkout Endpoint Response API Reference for the format of the response.

The recommendation will be in the data.transactionOptimisation field. It is important that you handle the following fields in your integration:

• data.transactionOptimisation.action
• data.transactionOptimisation.exemption
• data.transactionOptimisation.threeDSChallengePreference

More specific guidance on how to handle different recommendations is given in the next section.

Handling Recommendations

The table below explains what our recommendations may be and how to handle them.

It is important that we are aware of any restrictions that your payment services providers may have when accepting routing and exemption recommendations. Please let us know if any of the following applies so that we can provide you with the best possible recommendations:

• If any of your acquirers have breached their Reference Fraud Rates.
• If you work with a PSP that has any restricted routing. For instance, if your PSP can only accept authenticate routing recommendations, we will ensure that our ML doesn’t return authorise routing recommendations, and we will return AUTHENTICATE with NO_PREFERENCE when the transaction is One-Leg-Out.

Example Recommendation Responses

Several example recommendation responses are shown below.

Recommendation: Send to 3D Secure for authentication with challenge as mandate

{
  "status": 200,
  "timestamp": 1738162660,
  "data": {
    "customerId": "134cc0c0-7bcc-480a-9363-622689121fd4",
    "action": "ALLOW",
    "score": 18,
    "source": "RAVELIN",
    "scoreId": "38ba2d2a-050e-480d-a386-be3834cc6a7f",
    "transactionOptimisation": {
      "action": "AUTHENTICATE",
      "actionSource": "COMPLIANCE",
      "threeDSChallengePreference": "CHALLENGE_REQUESTED_AS_MANDATE",
      "compliance": {
        "type": "PSD2",
        "optimisable": false,
        "description": "must authenticate transactions with value 500 EUR or greater"
      }
    }
  }
}

Recommendation: Send to 3D Secure for authentication with TRA (low risk) exemption and no challenge requested

{
  "status": 200,
  "timestamp": 1738162660,
  "data": {
    "customerId": "134cc0c0-7bcc-480a-9363-622689121fd4",
    "action": "ALLOW",
    "score": 18,
    "source": "RAVELIN",
    "scoreId": "b8f9df31-4d90-4406-8ab9-892ed4f1d690",
    "transactionOptimisation": {
      "action": "AUTHENTICATE",
      "actionSource": "ML",
      "exemption": "TRANSACTION_RISK_ANALYSIS",
      "threeDSChallengePreference": "NO_CHALLENGE_REQUESTED",
      "compliance": {
        "type": "PSD2",
        "optimisable": true,
        "excludedRecommendations": [
          {
            "recommendation": {
              "route": "AUTHENTICATE",
              "exemption": "LOW_VALUE"
            },
            "description": "only available for transactions with value less than 30 EUR"
          },
          {
            "recommendation": {
              "route": "AUTHORISE",
              "exemption": "LOW_VALUE"
            },
            "description": "only available for transactions with value less than 30 EUR"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Recommendation: Proceed to authorisation with low value exemption

{
  "status": 200,
  "timestamp": 1738162660,
  "data": {
    "customerId": "134cc0c0-7bcc-480a-9363-622689121fd4",
    "action": "ALLOW",
    "score": 18,
    "source": "RAVELIN",
    "scoreId": "f4a0ff67-99b4-40f6-9486-273319379d0c",
    "transactionOptimisation": {
      "action": "AUTHORISE",
      "actionSource": "ML",
      "exemption": "LOW_VALUE",
      "compliance": {
        "type": "PSD2",
        "optimisable": true
      }
    }
  }
}

Example where transaction optimisation is not supported

{
  "status": 200,
  "message": "no transaction optimisation recommendation due to payment fraud action type",
  "timestamp": 17381626600,
  "data": {
    "customerId": "134cc0c0-7bcc-480a-9363-622689121fd4",
    "action": "REVIEW",
    "score": 54,
    "source": "RAVELIN",
    "scoreId": "6849a141-89c9-4f18-a07a-40dd928f8dbf"
  }
}

Authentication and authorisation attempt updates

Once a transaction has finished processing, you should update Ravelin with the outcome.

Send a request to our Checkout Endpoint and provide all the details of any authentication and authorisation attempts.

These are important fields that must be included in the transaction around the authentication:

These are important fields that must be included in the transaction around the authorisation:

Managing payment fraud and transaction optimisation recommendations

We provide transaction optimisation recommendations on what is considered low risk payment fraud traffic. We will therefore only provide optimised routing recommendations when we return an Allow for payment fraud.

We recommend the following actions for our recommendations in markets where authentication mandates exist:

Next steps

Test your transaction optimisation integration

Learn how to correctly handle transaction optimisation errors

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