Specter is Hellgate's real-time fraud intelligence layer – a low-latency, high-throughput decision engine that analyses every transaction as it moves through your payment flow, assigns a risk score, and blocks bad actors before checkout. It combines fast in-process rules with integrations to external risk services, and improves detection over time by ingesting transaction data.

Like every CPA component, Specter runs standalone or composed with other services.

→ Explore Specter

Specter evaluates signals such as device fingerprinting, geolocation, behavioural velocity (rolling-window counts per card, customer, device, or IP), and token-level data – without ever exposing sensitive card details. These feed both in-process rules and external risk backends.

The combination lets Specter catch patterns typical of fraud – unusual velocity, mismatched geographies, high-risk device signals – while keeping sensitive data protected.

→ See how Specter evaluates transactions

Specter assigns a real-time risk score (0–100) to every transaction as it moves through Hub. For chargeback-prone patterns – first-time customers, high-value orders from high-risk geographies, unusual velocity – it triggers configurable policies: stepped-up verification, 3-D Secure enforcement, or outright blocking. The score draws on device fingerprinting, geolocation, behavioural velocity, and token-level signals.

Because Specter integrates natively as a CPA component rather than a bolted-on API, its scoring feeds directly into routing and decisioning with zero added latency.

→ Learn more about Specter

Specter is backend-agnostic. It integrates with external risk engines – such as Visa Decision Manager, Worldpay FraudSight, Ravelin, and Featurespace ARIC Risk Hub – reached through a Link integration. You select the backend, or combination of backends, that fits your transaction profile, geography, and risk appetite.

Specter normalises each backend's output into a single Specter Score, and adding a new backend is configured at the platform level without changing your integration.

→ See all Specter backends

Yes. Specter and Guardian are independent CPA components. Specter provides real-time fraud intelligence and risk scoring; Guardian provides PCI-compliant vaulting and tokenization. They integrate naturally when both are in use – Specter can read token-level signals from Guardian to improve scoring accuracy – but each can be deployed standalone or alongside your existing infrastructure.

So you can add Specter for fraud without adopting Guardian, and vice versa.

→ Guardian overview

Specter can run standalone with basic orchestration, providing rule-based scoring and blocking on its own. Full rule appliance and advanced decisioning – where scores drive routing, retries, and step-up in real time – come together with the CPA Hub.

This means you can start with Specter for fraud scoring and unlock deeper decisioning as you compose it with Hub, without re-integrating.

→ See Specter integration options

Hub consumes the Specter Score and executes real-time policies against it – allow, block, step up to 3-D Secure, or route differently. Because Specter is a native CPA component rather than a third-party API, the score flows straight into Hub's routing and decisioning without added latency.

You define the thresholds and rules once; Hub enforces them consistently across every transaction and every provider.

→ See Specter + Hub decisioning

Yes. Specter is a decision engine built to encode complex fraud and business rules. You define local rules (boolean conditions and velocity counters over the decision context), maintain blacklists with optional TTLs, and set the score thresholds at which policies act. Rules and thresholds are yours to configure and tune.

Because everything is expressed as configurable rules, risk teams can adapt to new fraud patterns quickly, without a code release.

→ See the Specter rule engine

The Specter Score is a single, real-time risk score (0–100) assigned to every transaction. It combines Specter's in-process rules and velocity signals with the normalised output of any external risk backends you've connected, so multiple fraud sources resolve into one consistent number.

Downstream, Hub uses the score to make decisions – approve, block, or step up – giving you a single, tunable control point for fraud across all providers.

→ Learn about the Specter Score

Specter offers two integration patterns. The Decision API has your system call POST /api/decisions before authorizing and branch on the result – maximum control and the richest context. The Interceptor sits inline as a transparent proxy in front of your acquirer, forwarding approved transactions and returning a configured response for those it flags – adding fraud checks with no backend changes.

Both evaluate the same rulesets and return the same outcomes; they differ only in where the integration lives.

→ Compare Specter integration patterns

Specter is engineered as a low-latency, high-throughput engine. Local rules and velocity counters are evaluated in-process, with no external calls, so they add minimal latency. Because Specter integrates natively into the CPA rather than as a bolted-on third-party API, its scoring feeds directly into routing and decisioning with effectively zero added latency.

External risk backends, when used, are invoked only where your rules call for them – you control the trade-off between depth and speed.

→ See Specter's architecture

Specter continuously ingests transaction data, so detection sharpens as it observes more of your traffic. Lifecycle events – such as chargebacks and fraud reports – can auto-populate blacklists, closing the loop between confirmed fraud and future blocking. Combined with tunable rules and multiple risk backends, this lets your defences adapt to emerging patterns.

You keep control: the engine learns from your data while you decide the rules and thresholds it enforces.

→ See lifecycle events and learning

Yes. Specter is a decision engine built to encode complex fraud and business rules. You define local rules (boolean conditions and velocity counters over the decision context), maintain blacklists with optional TTLs, and set the score thresholds at which policies act – then Hub enforces them.

Because everything is expressed as configurable rules, risk teams can adapt to new fraud patterns quickly, without a code release.

→ See the Specter rule engine