How Preflect Minimized Onboarding Risk with Enigma Revenue Data

The Problem: Risky Merchants Slipping Through

Merchant onboarding is a balancing act. Move too slowly, and legitimate merchants take their business elsewhere. Move too fast, and fraudulent or high-risk merchants enter your portfolio, creating chargebacks, losses, and compliance headaches.

Preflect’s onboarding process was catching only 18% of problematic leads before they entered the pipeline. The remaining 82% consumed underwriting resources, generated support costs, and in the worst cases, resulted in loss events that directly impacted the bottom line.

The challenge wasn’t that their risk team lacked skill — it was that they lacked data. Without visibility into a merchant’s actual transaction history before onboarding, distinguishing legitimate businesses from risky ones required expensive downstream verification steps.

The Approach: Transaction Data as a Risk Signal

Preflect’s insight was that the presence or absence of card revenue is one of the strongest early indicators of merchant legitimacy. A business with a verifiable transaction history is fundamentally different from one with no financial footprint.

By integrating Enigma’s card revenue data into the onboarding workflow, Preflect could evaluate merchants against a simple but powerful criterion: does this business have real, observable economic activity?

Leads with positive card revenue in Enigma’s data received faster processing. Leads without matching revenue signals were flagged for enhanced review or disqualified — before consuming underwriting resources.

The Results: 3.3x More Risky Leads Blocked

The data-driven approach transformed Preflect’s risk profile.

By only pursuing inbound leads that had positive card revenue in Enigma’s data, Preflect’s lead disqualification rate increased from 18% to 60% — blocking 3.3x more risky leads before they entered the pipeline.

Fraud Prevention at the Front Door

Since implementing Enigma, Preflect has had significantly lower fraud rates among new customers. The key insight is that fraud prevention is most effective — and least expensive — when it happens before onboarding, not after.

Operational Efficiency

By filtering out risky merchants early, Preflect’s underwriting team focuses their expertise on edge cases that genuinely require human judgment, rather than spending time on merchants that should never have entered the pipeline.

Technical Specifications