Stripe: Radar Technical Guide

Stripe builds products that enable hundreds of thousands of e-commerce companies, SaaS businesses, on-demand marketplaces, nonprofits, and platforms to conduct business online. One inescapable facet of online commerce--and one that, unfortunately, frequently comes as an unpleasant surprise--is fraud. Unlike businesses that accept payments in person, internet businesses are liable for fraudulent purchases--this despite the fact that they are no more experts on fraud than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. As a result, many internet businesses have had to build up teams of fraud analysts and expend engineering effort on fraud detection systems. At Stripe, we want to help businesses focus on their product and customer experiences and not on fraud, so we've developed Stripe Radar, a suite of modern tools for fraud detection and prevention. The goal of this guide is to provide more detail on the machine learning that powers the core of Radar, explain how we think about the efficacy and performance of fraud detection systems, and describe how other tools in the Radar suite can help businesses optimize their outcomes.