Purpose-built for PSPs, acquirers, and card networks — the risk teams who need to know a merchant is legitimate before they process, and stays legitimate after. Aval inspects the actual payment infrastructure, not just the transaction log: shell merchants, mule accounts, pass-through behaviour, and BRAM/VIRP content violations, caught before they become a scheme fine.
Fraudsters now use generative AI to build synthetic identities, deepfake KYC videos, and polished storefronts that pass a manual review clean. A merchant application file was never the whole picture — and checking it once, at onboarding, is a snapshot of a business that changes every week. Aval is the risk signal your underwriting team needs before, during, and after the merchant goes live.
01
A legitimate merchant's rails get hijacked to process someone else's transactions — the acquirer is liable regardless of intent.
02
Merchants pass KYC clean, then quietly change what they sell. MCC-based checks are a one-time snapshot, not continuous monitoring.
03
Funnel accounts and shell entities that exist purely to move money — increasingly coordinated to evade single-institution detection.
04
Scam content posted on social platforms routes buyers to a "legitimate-looking" merchant or payment link — most competitors don't even flag it.
05
Payment links generated outside normal storefront review are a known infiltration vector for laundering.
06
Fraud teams see the transaction, AML teams see the account — neither sees the full chain regulators now expect provably monitored.
A composite risk score assembled from twelve factors across business identity, category, web presence, financial signals, and behavioural patterns. Click through three sample merchants to see the underwriting call.
A registered apparel exporter with a matching website, clean sanctions screening, three years of consistent transaction volume, and no flags from any card scheme. Aval returns a low-risk score with high confidence. Underwriting can approve without additional review.
Every module is explainable and evidence-backed — screenshots, timestamps, and a rationale attached to every score, not a black box.
50+ checks across technical security, identity, and registration before go-live.
AI assigns primary & secondary MCCs with confidence scoring and an audit trail.
BRAM/VIRP-aligned scanning catches prohibited content before a scheme fine.
$25K–$100K+ per violation avoidedDeep scraping surfaces hidden crypto wallets, UPI VPAs, and disguised checkout pages.
Fuzzy-matched screening across PEP, sanctions, and adverse-legal records, rerun continuously.
Diffs every merchant asset — pricing, policies, payment methods — and flags risk-introducing change.
24/7 surveillance of news, social, reviews, and the dark web for adverse signal.
Visual-similarity and typosquat detection for impersonation, phishing, and counterfeit claims.
Behavioural and ownership analysis exposes shell merchants and pass-through fund movement — Aval's core defense.
Sub-merchant-level risk visibility across platform economies and payment facilitators.
Multi-MCC governance for e-commerce, SaaS, and hybrid digital business models.
Classification governance for card-present, franchise, and blended online-offline merchants.
Maps every merchant-owned domain, landing page, and payment endpoint on the web.
A live merchant run: Aval reads the storefront, assigns primary, secondary, and tertiary MCCs with a confidence score on each, and shows its reasoning inline — no separate audit request needed.
No black box. Aval works the same way every hard engineering problem gets solved — question the requirement, delete the noise, then automate what's left. Every verdict ships with the graph that produced it.
Five underwriting signals resolve into one composite score, then one verdict — and every edge in this graph is a fact you can trace back to source.
Every Aval decision is anchored on Signet. When your card scheme, sponsor bank, or regulator asks how a merchant was underwritten, Aval produces the full record — the data used, the model version, the analyst who signed off. Signed, timestamped, verifiable.
$7.35B
Financial assets secured
59M+
Documents issued
70+
Enterprise implementations
Underwriting merchants faster with fewer manual reviews, and keeping them clean once live. Pairs directly with Assay for the AML side.
Monitoring merchant portfolios across ISO/PSP partners to catch BRAM violations before they trigger fines and remediation.
Vetting third-party sellers who use the platform's payment rails. Same underwriting discipline, marketplace-scale volume.
Meeting the risk requirements of the sponsor bank without building an in-house team of underwriters and analysts.
Vetting corporate spend counterparties, expense management vendors, and cross-border payment corridor partners.
Merchant risk for the fiat side of crypto payment flows. Where card-scheme scrutiny is highest and margins are thinnest.
Book a 20-minute intro call. Tell us a bit about your team and we'll come prepared with relevant merchant scenarios.