Monitoring FAQ

• Who can use the Monitoring feature?
• What does GoCardless consider to be fraud?
• How does GoCardless calculate fraudulent events?
• How does GoCardless estimate prevented fraud?

Who can use the Monitoring feature?

Monitoring is a feature of GoCardless Protect+.

GoCardless Protect+ is currently only available to users on an Advanced or Pro plan who are based in the UK, US, Germany, or France. If you meet these requirements and are interested in using this product, please reach out to your account manager.

Note: The Estimate of total fraud losses that have been prevented and Recovered total from challenging chargebacks graphs will only show useful data if Verified Mandates and Challenge Chargebacks, respectively, are used. Data for the Estimate of total fraud losses that have been prevented graph will be available after 2 months of usage of Verified Mandates.

What does GoCardless consider to be fraud?

These are the main types of fraud that GoCardless has identified by looking at merchant activity and using our machine-learning model.

1. Identity fraud: The customer uses bank account details that don’t belong to them or aren't suitable for a direct debit setup.

2. No intent to pay: The customer uses a valid bank account but no funds are transferred to the merchant. This might be caused by a lack of funds, payment cancellations or mandate cancellations a short period of time after setup.

3. Unfair chargebacks: The customer uses a valid bank account but payments are wrongfully charged back.

How does GoCardless calculate fraudulent events?

GoCardless uses automated reports from the bank debit schemes to identify events that cause friction for our merchants. Using the status of the customer's bank account, the mandate with your business or individual payments, we can infer fraudulent activity.
In addition to that, we use any merchant input to GoCardless to enrich this dataset.

How does GoCardless estimate prevented fraud?

GoCardless aims to show you the estimated monetary value of your fraud prevention efforts using GoCardless Protect+. We track how many fraudulent events we think have been prevented by putting payers through Verified Mandates. This graph is only an estimate, because we can’t be sure how much fraud has been prevented if it never happened.

This number is calculated from the product of the following three elements:

• number of fraudulent events - estimated based on your historic traffic and observed fraudulent events trend

• success detection rate - the percentage of fraudulent events being correctly detected for verification

• estimated mandate value - this is the averaged mandate value based on your previous monthly transaction history, only a single payment value is used.