Payment & Fraud
Management System

Overview

Wakanow processed millions of naira in travel payments daily. As transaction volume grew, fraud rates increased and the manual review process couldn't scale. The fraud detection system flagged too broadly — blocking legitimate transactions and increasing customer support burden.

I led the design of a redesigned payment management and fraud triage system, grounded in a full service blueprint of the existing end-to-end flow.

Problem

The fraud detection system had a high false-positive rate — legitimate customer transactions were being flagged and blocked, generating customer complaints and manual review backlog. At the same time, actual fraud cases were going undetected because analysts were spending time on low-risk false positives.

Process

• Mapped 4 swimlane service blueprints covering customer, agent, fraud team, and payment provider flows
• Identified 11 handoff points in the existing process where delays and errors occurred
• Worked with fraud analysts to understand the heuristics they used to assess risk
• Designed a risk-scored transaction queue with configurable thresholds
• Built structured disposition forms replacing free-text notes
• Created decision documentation templates for audit trail compliance

Design Decisions

The central insight from research: analysts already had good mental models for fraud risk — they just lacked tools that matched. The new system surfaced the signals they already used (velocity, location mismatch, payment method pattern) as structured data in the review interface, rather than requiring them to assemble this manually.

Configurable risk thresholds gave team leads control over the balance between blocking fraud and approving legitimate transactions — previously a fixed, binary system.