What is “Risk Evaluation”?

When you create a card, a bank account or process a payment with Circle Payments APIs, the response will include a riskEvaluation section.

Risk Evaluation is the response for the check that is executed by Circle's Risk Service. The Risk Service automatically runs checks for every card, bank account and payment.

In the current version of this risk evaluation, this data element will only be present in the response in situations where the decision made by Circle's Risk Service is denied. We plan to subsequently launch additional Risk Management features which will see the expansion of the risk evaluation to decisions other than denied and also to an asynchronous mode.

When Circle's Risk Service sets the status of a card, bank account or payment to denied you should receive a response similar to below:

"riskEvaluation": {
    "decision": "denied",
    "reason": "3000"
},

As you can see, the data element contains two fields:

Risk Evaluation: Denied Reason Codes

Below are the current reason code categories (or buckets) you will find in the risk evaluation responses.

The specific reason codes that apply currently are documented below.

If you are interested in some custom configurations, please contact the Circle Risk team.