When users initiate Remitly transactions on the BiyaPay platform, approximately 3% to 5% of the transactions enter the “on hold” (pause/review) state. The primary factor triggering such situations (accounting for more than 60% of the reasons for freezing) is usually the abnormal behavior pattern identified by the platform or Remitly’s risk control system. For instance, if a user’s device or network environment changes the login country more than three times within a short period (such as 24 hours) (for example, from a US IP to a Southeast Asian IP), uses an unauthenticated proxy tool, or attempts to initiate more than five transactions with an amount ranging from 500 to 1,000 US dollars in a single day, The system algorithm will calculate the risk threshold exceeding the preset value (such as 90 points) based on hundreds of real-time data points (login time, geographical location, device fingerprint, deviation rate of operation habits, etc.) and automatically suspend trading. The 2024 report of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) indicates that over 35% of payment frauds involve sudden changes in device environments. Therefore, this real-time risk control interception can effectively reduce potential fraud losses by approximately 85%.
Information deficiency or mismatch arising from the compliance review process is the second largest cause of freezing (accounting for approximately 25%). When the user was undergoing identity verification (KYC), the submitted document information (such as passport ID number and issuance date) failed to pass the accuracy check of the OCR verification system (with an error rate greater than 0.1%). Or there is a significant deviation (more than ±25% difference) between the declared occupation and income data (such as filling in a monthly income of 2,000 US dollars but a transfer amount of 3,000 US dollars) and the user profile in the platform’s anti-money laundering (AML) database. A more stringent scenario is that when the recipient’s name partially matches (similarity >75%) with the sanctions list of the receiving country, or the destination of the funds is a high-risk area (such as a country recently placed on the gray list by FATF), the platform will enforce a Deep Dive Screening. The review period may be extended from the average of 2 to 6 hours in the standard process to over 48 hours. A 2023 study by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) shows that strict AML/KYC review mechanisms have reduced the incidence of illegal cross-border payment activities by approximately 22%.
Questions raised from the verification of the source of funds also account for about 10% of the frozen cases. If a user initiates a Remitly transaction using the wallet balance in BiyaPay but the balance is transferred to a large amount of cryptocurrency (such as more than $10,000 equivalent BTC) through a new associated account within a short period of time (such as within 1 hour), or if the user chooses to pay with an American Express Card but the billing address has changed twice in the last 60 days and no valid proof can be provided, The system may freeze transactions due to an excessively high risk score of the fund source path (exceeding 75 points out of 100), and require users to submit screenshots of on-chain transactions (proving that the traceability of the BTC source on-chain address exceeds 95%) or copies of the latest water and electricity bills (the address verification accuracy must reach 100% matching). Blockchain tracking agency Chainalysis once disclosed that approximately 18% of illegal funds attempted to be injected into payment platforms after being washed through mixers. Tracing and reviewing the sources of funds can enhance the security of funds by about 30%.
Finally, approximately 5% of the freezes result from systemic or policy adjustment factors. When a sudden surge in the traffic of a specific payment channel is detected (with the instantaneous peak exceeding 200% of the average) or abnormal fluctuations in the currency exchange rate market of the receiving country (such as a depreciation of more than 5% for the Nigerian Naira within a day), in order to ensure the stability of the channel and prevent users from suffering losses due to sudden changes in the exchange rate, The platform or Remitly may temporarily suspend the trading of this path for about 15 to 30 minutes for a stress test (processing a backlog of approximately 10 times the normal amount). In addition, when receiving a request from a payment network partner (such as Visa Network) for compliance verification of a certain transaction (typically for high-value transactions, such as a single transaction exceeding $10,000), it is necessary to suspend waiting for 3 to 7 working days for cross-border data exchange verification. According to the 2023 operation manual of the European Payment Services Association (EPSA), such systemic suspensions account for approximately 3.8% of total payment failures. However, by introducing an AI load balancing system, their occurrence frequency has been significantly reduced by 15%.
Therefore, the status of “remitly transaction on hold” in the remitly transaction at BiyaPay is a direct result of the operation of multiple risk control mechanisms. According to BiyaPay’s 2024 first-quarter operation report, on average, each freeze event triggers approximately 2.3 user interactions (via APP push messages or emails). Among them, 76% of users have an average unfreezing time of 8.7 hours (the fastest being 1 hour) after supplementing materials as required (such as identity proof, source of funds documents, address proof). The final successful transaction completion rate reached 90.5%, which is much higher than the industry average unfreezing success rate (about 75%). After users requested manual accelerated review through the 7/24 customer support entry within the platform, the unfreezing time efficiency was further reduced by 34% to an average of 5.7 hours. This rigorous yet responsive risk control strategy has enabled the platform to rank among the top 15% in Gartner’s payment risk control effectiveness score for two consecutive years.