Glossary
Risk Score
A risk score is a computed estimate — often built from many weighted signals — of how suspicious a particular request appears, used to adjust an authorization outcome rather than to be the outcome itself. A request scoring as unusually risky might trigger an additional verification step or a closer review, while one scoring as ordinary proceeds under the system's standard rules.
The important distinction is that a risk score modulates a decision; it isn't, by itself, the decision. A system that lets a sufficiently low risk score silently substitute for an actual authorization check has replaced a deterministic rule with a probabilistic one at the exact point that rule was supposed to be doing its job — the score is most defensible as an input that adjusts scrutiny, not as a stand-in for the underlying policy.