How a proactive risk management philosophy and structured onboarding framework empower merchants to trade safely across Africa.

In digital commerce, payment processing often feels like balancing on a tightrope. Merchants need seamless, instant checkout experiences for their customers, yet they must continuously defend against financial crime, fraud, and complex regulatory requirements. For many businesses, navigating this balance feels overwhelming.

At Peach Payments, solving this exact operational complexity is driven by Tegan Borchert, Director of Risk & Onboarding. By reframing risk management from a rigid administrative barrier into a supportive security mechanism, Tegan and her team enable merchants—from local SMEs to regional enterprises—to expand confidently without sacrificing security.

1. Friction-Free, Risk-Aware Merchant Onboarding

Merchant onboarding is often where business momentum stalls. Strict compliance requirements can lead to unnecessary delays or blanket rejections. Tegan’s approach balances rigor with commercial reality.

Peach Payments implements a structured, multi-step risk assessment that evaluates each business based on its legal entity structure, industry, operational model, and geographic footprint:

• Know Your Customer (KYC/KYB) & Sanctions Screening: Verifying legal entities, directors, and ultimate beneficial owners against PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) and global sanction databases.
• Business Model & Web Content Analysis: Reviewing merchant product lines, pricing consistency, and terms to ensure compliance with card scheme rules (e.g., Visa and Mastercard regulations).
• Pragmatic Risk Decisioning: Rather than issuing flat declines to higher-risk business models (such as Drop Shipping), Tegan’s team frequently provides alternative pathways. For instance, where appropriate, the team can explore alternative payment or onboarding pathways for businesses that do not initially fit standard card-processing risk criteria. 

This proactive flexibility ensures legitimate businesses can go live quickly while safeguarding Peach Payments and its merchant ecosystem against fraudulent entities.

2. Multi-Layered Security and Real-Time Protection

Once a merchant is live, transaction monitoring becomes the primary line of defense. Tegan oversees an integrated security layer that mitigates fraud behind the scenes without disrupting authentic buyers:

• 3D Secure (3DS) Integration: Using 3DS authentication where required helps reduce unauthorised card fraud and, where the applicable liability-shift conditions are met, can shift liability for qualifying fraud disputes from the merchant to the issuer. 
• Automated Fraud Checks: Utilizing real-time IP tracking, BIN (Bank Identification Number) validation, and card blacklists to block suspicious payment attempts automatically.
• Custom Operational Rules: Merchants can deploy tailored risk controls, such as velocity checks (limiting payment retry rates) and plausibility checks (detecting geographic mismatches between card issues and checkout locations).
• Real-Time Transaction Monitoring: Combining transaction-level risk signals, rules, operational monitoring and fraud intelligence to identify suspicious activity and emerging fraud patterns. 

3. Protecting the Bottom Line: Chargeback Management

Uncontrolled chargebacks pose a fatal risk to online merchants, as exceeding card scheme thresholds can trigger monitoring, remediation requirements and potentially restrictions on processing. .

Under Tegan’s leadership, Peach Payments maintains an active dispute and chargeback management team that works directly with merchants and acquiring banks. By analyzing chargeback trends, assisting with evidence collation, and pre-screening high-risk daily settlements, Peach Payments maintains an aggregation chargeback ratio significantly below industry penalty thresholds.

4. Enabling Pan-African Expansion via “One API”

As Peach Payments expands across Africa, merchants face a fragmented landscape of payment methods, regulatory nuances, and regional fraud profiles.

Rather than treating risk as a localised barrier, Tegan works alongside growth teams to position risk controls as an enabler for regional scale. By offering a consolidated “one API” integration backed by standardized risk management, merchants can launch into new territories like Kenya or Mauritius with enterprise-grade security infrastructure already built in.

Security as a Competitive Advantage

Risk management doesn’t have to mean friction. Through structured onboarding, active chargeback protection, and flexible security tools, Tegan Borchert and the Risk & Onboarding team ensure that Peach Payments merchants can focus on what matters most: growing their business safely.