The purpose of breaking strategy design into phases is to make you look at your business process in terms of goals — for each phase there is a definitive goal of what you want to achieve. Five phases cover the order lifecycle end to end, and each one earns its place by catching what the phase before it couldn't.
The five strategic phases
- Pre-Screen: automated initial review using hot lists, positive lists, velocity checks, rules, and consumer authentication to eliminate bad orders before further processing.
- Payment: the processes required for order acceptance itself, including authorization, address verification, and card security checks.
- Post-Screen: a more advanced review for orders that passed the earlier phases, applying business logic and fraud-prevention techniques — often checking positive lists first.
- Review: the manual phase — spot checks, review queues, and manual sorting to catch fraud the automation missed, or convert borderline orders instead of rejecting them outright.
- Accounting: the post-acceptance phase, running up to 12 months out, covering settlements, credits, chargebacks, and feeding what you learn back into strategy refinement.
“For each phase there is a definitive goal of what you want to achieve.”
Matching intensity to risk level
Not every phase deserves equal weight for every merchant. The right level of fraud-prevention intensity follows your actual fraud rate and loss exposure, not a one-size-fits-all checklist:
Medium risk — fraud rate 0.75%+. Post-Screen and a real Review queue start paying for themselves.
High risk — fraud rate 1%+. All five phases need real investment, and Accounting needs to actively feed lessons back into the earlier phases, not just close the books.
Why the phase-based view matters
Most fraud programs that stall out did skip a phase, not choose the wrong tool within one. A strong Payment-phase setup with no Review queue behind it still lets borderline orders get rejected outright instead of converted; a strong Pre-Screen with no Accounting loop behind it never learns from the chargebacks it eventually eats. The phases aren't a menu — they're a chain, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest, or missing, link.