Beyond the Rules Engine: A Business Analyst’s Inside Look at AI for Payment Fraud Detection

If you work in payments or e-commerce at an enterprise level, you know the “Monday Morning Dread.” It’s that email from Finance highlighting a weekend spike in chargebacks, usually originating from a specific region or involving a suspiciously high volume of digital goods. For years, my role as a Business Analyst involved reacting to these spikes by updating our “rules engine.” We’d add logic like: IF transaction > $500 AND IP location ≠ billing address country AND items contain “gift card”, THEN block. It felt productive, but it was a losing battle. Rules are brittle. They are reactive.