ProductBoard · PDLC Gate

Does this feature need an IRA?

An automated pre-screen that reads a requirement and decides whether it must go through the IRA process — or reports what the requirement fails to say. Derived from IRA Checklist 3.

DRAFT — parameters below are proposed, not confirmed by Compliance

The IRA Checklist defines what gets reviewed once an initiative is already in IRA. It does not define what sends an initiative there in the first place. This page fills that gap with a working rule set, and states plainly which numbers in it are placeholders.

Of the checklist's 60 items, only the 8 under Business Sponsor → Risk identification have screening semantics. Those 8 are the rules below. The other 52 describe the review itself and are out of scope here.

Provisional parameters

Four values decide how this screen behaves. Three are proposed by Product and await Compliance sign-off. The fourth — the definition behind IRA-7 — does not exist yet, so that rule currently reports without triggering.

Trigger logic ANY single YES Proposed

One rule firing is enough to route the feature to IRA. No second threshold, no weighting. Compliance may want a higher bar for some rules.

N — financial lines > 100 customers / day Proposed

Customer reach above which IRA-5 fires, for features under a financial product (Credit, CashNow, Money, Collections, Lending, Acquiring, Quantix Risk…).

N — communication lines > 10,000 customers Proposed

The same threshold for non-financial products (Core, Core CoE, Connect, AI, Open Platform). The business line is read from the ProductBoard hierarchy, never guessed by the model; anything unmapped defaults to the stricter financial threshold.

X — rollback window 2 hours Proposed

Revertable within 2 hours via remote config or server-side rollback, or IRA-6 fires. Note the consequence: a client change with no config switch can only be reverted by shipping a new build, which always exceeds 2 hours — so every such change triggers IRA. Compliance should confirm this is intended, or grant client releases a separate rule.

IRA-7 — "critical path" not defined Missing

Without a definition IRA-7 cannot return NO. On technical and infrastructure work it fires on documented failure modes — reading a described fallback as evidence of risk — so it currently penalises the best-written requirements and is held out of the trigger set. On financial requirements it caused zero false triggers: every feature it flagged was already triggered by another rule. Proposed wording: a dependency is critical if its failure affects call setup, message delivery, login, or any movement of funds.

How a verdict is reached

Each rule returns one of three values. The third one carries the weight.

YES

A trigger is present in the requirement text, quoted as evidence.

NO

The requirement affirmatively rules it out — "no new third parties", "UAE only under the existing licence".

UNKNOWN

The requirement is silent. Not a pass — an unanswered question, returned to the author.

Silence is never NO. A requirement that does not mention vendors is not a requirement without vendors. Allowing silence to clear a rule would make this screen produce a reassuring result from an empty document — which is the exact failure it exists to prevent.

Rolling up: any YESIRA_REQUIRED. No YES but any UNKNOWNUNDETERMINED, with the list of what to add. All NOIRA_NOT_REQUIRED, meaning only that no trigger was found in the text — never that Compliance has signed off.

The eight rules

RuleFires whenStatus
IRA-1
Third parties
A vendor, partner, processor, external SDK or third-party API is introduced that is not already in production use. Active
IRA-2
Data
A personal or sensitive data type new to this product is processed, or existing data moves across a new border or to a new party. Active
IRA-3
Regulatory
A jurisdiction we do not already serve is targeted, or an activity falls outside the licence this product operates under. Active
IRA-4
Financial crime
A new money-movement path, funding or payout channel is created, or KYC / screening / limits / transaction monitoring change. Active
IRA-5
Customer impact
Customer-facing reach exceeds the threshold for the business line — 100/day financial, 10,000 communication. Active
IRA-6
Reversibility
Rollback takes longer than 2 hours, needs an app-store release, or the change is irreversible (migration run, notification sent, funds moved). Active
IRA-7
Resilience
A new dependency lands on the critical path — pending a definition of "critical path". Reports only
IRA-8
Conduct
Pricing, fees or customer-facing claims change, or the target segment may include vulnerable customers. Flags for review; never clears on its own. Active

Dry run on real requirements

Run read-only against all 68 released features on financial product lines (Botim Money, CashNow, EasyCash, SNPL, Acquiring, Quantix Risk, Collections, Salary Loan, Split Pay, SME Lending, WPS, Middle Service — plus unclassified products, which default to the financial threshold). Timeframes ending 31 Jul – 1 Oct 2026. Nothing was written back.

44%
30 features triggered IRA
55%
38 undetermined — not enough information to decide
0%
cleared — nothing could be ruled out
7.1
of 8 items missing, on average, per requirement

What triggered, and why

The 30 triggers hold up to review. No false positives were found in the list. The features tripping the most rules:

FeatureRules fired
Terrapay Integrationthird party · data · regulatory · financial crime
Mastercard (Global provider) integrationthird party · financial crime
ARP Digital Integration (India & Phil)third party · regulatory · financial crime
Migration to ZAND VIBAN for merchantsthird party · financial crime · reversibility
Credit card fee on checkoutfinancial crime · reversibility · conduct
SNPL — Risk Based Pricing (Phase 2)financial crime · conduct
Cashnow RENEWAL Customer Tiering & Screeningfinancial crime · conduct

Payment-rail integrations, cross-border corridors, card-scheme onboarding, pricing strategy and credit-risk rule changes — each one genuinely warrants a compliance look. Two rules carry most of the signal: IRA-4 (money movement) fired 16 times and IRA-8 (pricing and claims) 18 times, together 62% of all triggers.

Why the other 55% could not be decided

Read the 55% correctly. It does not say those features are low-risk. It says their requirements do not contain enough information to judge risk at all.

Of the 68: 24 have a completely empty description and 42 are under 400 characters. The median is 195 characters.

Whether a feature can be decided tracks almost entirely with whether anything was written down. Requirements that triggered average 857 characters of description; those that could not be decided average 312 — barely a third as much.

So the constraint today is requirement quality, not the strictness of the compliance bar. That changes what to do about it: tighten the PRD standard, not staff up the review.

Comparison: mixed sample

An earlier run over 30 randomly sampled features across all product lines gives a useful contrast — 30% triggered, 70% undetermined, 0% cleared. Two differences matter:

Proposed rollout

Split by business line, because the two behave differently.

In both cases the screen reports missing information back to the author from day one. That part needs no one's agreement and delivers value immediately.

What we need from Compliance