It’s been an exciting and gratifying month at Forter, as we were able to welcome the arrival of a new spring with the celebration of two new awards. Both the awards and the events drew attention to the fact that retailers are becoming increasingly aware that keeping up with their consumers in today’s world means moving fast – or getting left behind.
Most Innovative Company with the Best Fraud Prevention
At the Innovation Project 2016, which took place on the Harvard campus last week, Forter was presented with the Silver for Most Innovative Company. We are honored by this recognition of the truly innovative impact of Forter’s new generation fraud prevention solution, and by the interest expressed by so many payments experts in the impact of fully automated fraud prevention.
Earlier in the month, Forter was also awarded the Gold for Best Fraud Prevention at the Florin Awards, a part of the European Payments Summit in Brussels, Belgium. Innovation was a key factor in these awards as well, within the context of fraud prevention that could offer the most value to retailers.
What Lies Behind Forter’s Wins: Today’s World Moves Fast
What we found at both awards ceremonies, and at the events more generally, was that retailers and payments players are beginning to feel that full automation in fraud prevention is a real necessity.
By contrast, manual reviews and rules engines which must be updated manually are becoming something of a liability for merchants grappling with the challenges of a real-time reality.
The demand for automation comes from two directions, both of which were explored in depth during the course of the conferences our team attended over the last month.
The Automation of Online Fraud
Today’s fraudsters are highly sophisticated and benefit from an equally sophisticated underground ecosystem. Online fraud is itself becoming automated. In fact, the Global Fraud Attack Index™ found that suspected botnet attacks accounted for an astonishing 82% of attempts originating in the USA.
This means that scaling is a crucial issue. Fraudsters are no longer restricted by what is possible on an individual, manual level.
CEO Michael Reitblat described how this situation was developing a year ago, and his outline has only become more pertinent with time: “Now [the cybercriminals] are becoming more institutionalized or organized, not in the ‘Godfather’ sense of the phrase, but in the online ecosystem sense. There are people who are only building cybercrime tools and selling them and that is literally all they do. There is now cybercrime as a service. You can have a botnet built for $2 an hour. This is why collectively, the cybercriminals have become so much better.”
If the retailer isn’t able to automate and scale similarly, they’re going to be outdone and overwhelmed by the efforts of savvy criminals who use technology, experience and shared expertise.
The Customer Comes First
So much for the fraudulent buyers. The other half of the picture is the genuine buyers. In most areas of a business, the customer comes first: the key to driving conversions is to provide what your consumers want, when they want it, in the way that they want it. Shopping should be a pleasure.
Unfortunately, this drive often breaks down online when it runs up against fraud prevention. It can often appear, to the rest of the company, that the fraud department specializes in saying ‘no’. Delays in confirmation and fulfillment caused by manual reviews annoy and confuse customers, rejection as false positives insults them, and requests for further proofs can leave buyers suspicious about the people asking, or offended that their identity was ever doubted.
Automation makes these problems disappear overnight. With the removal of manual reviews, fraud prevention becomes real-time and the problematic delays no longer exist. False positives can be dramatically reduced as machine learning and human expertise combine to create a system that is accurate rather than risk-averse, treating customers as “innocent unless proven guilty.” And no further information is necessary.
Shopping becomes streamlined, seamless and friction-free – meaning a far better customer experience and, in turn, more sales.
What we found at the awards ceremonies, the conferences attached to them, and at MRC Vegas and eTail West, the other two events our team attended in the last month, is that retailers are waking up to the fact that everything moves fast in today’s world. To keep up with both good customers and bad ones, automation is essential.
To find out more about how fully automated fraud prevention can transform loss prevention into sales enablement, download this CNP-Forter white paper now.
