Manual review queues are about to explode during Black Friday and holiday season. Most merchants send 8-10% of orders to manual review, but without proper optimization, that could jump to 15-20% when volume increases 4x.

Luke Van Hine, Data Scientist at Signifyd, reveals how to optimize your manual review queue before the holiday rush hits. The counterintuitive insight: if you have 0% fraud losses in certain buckets with only 89% approval rates, you're actually leaving money on the table.

The analysis process is surprisingly straightforward. Start by binning your current manual review cases by risk score, looking at approval rates and loss rates in each bucket. If you see buckets with high approval rates and zero losses, your team isn't taking enough risk there. You can often reduce queue volume by 40-50% while maintaining or even improving overall performance.

Key topics covered:

[00:00] Intro

[03:14] Why manual review optimization matters now

[07:20] Black Friday volume surge multipliers

[10:48] Gray area fraud getting harder to spot

[14:32] How queue optimization drives revenue increases

[16:42] Merchant case study pushing approval rates

[21:53] What actually sends orders to manual review

[25:03] Baseline analysis before changing thresholds

[27:59] Score bucket analysis reveals hidden opportunities

[30:14] Real merchant feedback on rule optimization

[34:04] Account age patterns in manual review

[36:23] Order value buckets reveal shipping fraud

[40:05] Black Friday staffing challenges ahead

[42:22] Managing repeat customer false positives

[45:13] Why fraud prevention stays exciting

For merchants heading into peak season, now is the time to run this analysis. You have about a month to test boundaries and find those areas where you can auto-approve more orders. The goal isn't just stopping fraud - it's maximizing revenue while managing risk.

The data shows good traffic increases at much higher rates than fraud during Black Friday week. Fashion sees 4x order volume but fraud rates drop to 37% of normal levels. However, electronics merchants should stay vigilant due to sophisticated fraud rings targeting that vertical.

Queue optimization isn't just about reducing workload for your team during the holidays. It's about capturing more of those first-time customers who are making quick purchasing decisions during limited-time sales events.