The commercial success of your business will be primarily influenced by the reputation you enjoy with your target audience. Do you operate in a competitive field where innovation is at home? If so, the recognition of your brand will be the best way to increase the profitability of your venture. However, no matter how qualitative the services or products you market are, if they are not secured correctly or if your users’ data is accessed illegally, then your business will ultimately fail.
Investing in payment fraud detection is the only way to prevent financial damage that would severely affect your company’s budget or reputational losses that could wipe out years of brand deals, marketing strategies, and SERP increases. Using a professional payment fraud analytics program will allow you to retain the confidence of your target audience and keep your venture away from the eyes of regulatory bodies. Does your company have customers in Europe? Do you operate in a highly controlled field, such as finance or healthcare? Then, falling for payment fraud could make you breach data protection regulations.
Investing in payment fraud analytics is the best way to maintain the legality of your venture, avoid problems with competent authorities, retain the operational efficiency of your departments, and detect attacks before they have the opportunity to affect your organization. High-quality payment fraud detection programs are a staple of well-run businesses. So, for your field of activity, they may be the only available tool to make your offerings reachable and profitable.
How Will a Payment Fraud Detection Program Work?
Data is everything. Therefore, the effectiveness of the program you use will be determined by the amount of information it has access to. The AI revolution of the last few years has made the methods fraudsters use to access funds more sophisticated than ever before. In response, fraud prevention programs that are used on a global scale had to adapt and start using neural networks for pattern recognition. The way such a program works is, at first glance, quite simple. However, the differentiator is the accuracy and speed of the operations.
Suppose you are an e-commerce website, and a customer who has shopped on your pages before wants to make a new purchase. The high-quality payment fraud detection application you use will record the data provided by the customer on the previous invoice and compare it with the information known to belong to the credit card. If there are discrepancies, such as a different name, or if the transaction amounts do not match the client’s history, then something might be up, and the operation will be flagged and require extra authentication.
The program you use will employ payment fraud analytics to calculate the percentage of successfully blocked fraud attempts. What data will be recorded by the application used? Everything from transactions to geographical locations, used devices, or purchase patterns. Suppose the customer used to purchase moderate-value products using a mobile phone but now wants to buy an expensive product using a desktop in another country. In that case, this is a red flag, and it will demand extra authentication. Fraud prevention is all about spotting patterns and identifying issues proactively.
Everything Is Related to Data Incorporation
Losses from online financial fraud are expected to reach a record high of $91 billion per year by 2028. Therefore, investing in payment fraud analytics has become a priority for most companies active in international markets. The way these programs work is complex, and their effectiveness is strongly correlated with the adaptive learning algorithm they use and the volume of data they have access to. When the customer initiates a transaction, the program will extract information such as the device model or the underlying IP address.
Next, this information will be broken down into smaller components, and the algorithms will identify potential irregularities in the recorded patterns. The process itself is automated and should take only a few milliseconds. For this to be possible, high-quality payment fraud analytics applications make use of neural networks, which are adaptable to market conditions. The higher the volume of data used in the neural network, the more flexible and accurate the program will be. If anomalies are recorded, or if the risk score of the transaction is high, then the user may be asked to try other methods of approving the transaction, such as responding to a push notification.
The Only Viable Way to Protect Your Business
Are you a start-up company looking to save money? Then, you might be tempted to handle the investigation of transactions made on your website manually. But, ultimately, this could be a disastrous idea. Without a professional program to automate the investigation process, transactions will have to be verified by your employees, which will affect their productivity. Moreover, the human factor is the weakest link in any security system, and it will be a matter of time before your venture falls prey to a sophisticated fraud attempt.
Your employees can be adequately trained to detect fraudulent transactions, and company management can create a rule-based system that automatically detects a large proportion of transactions with suspicious signatures. However, the effectiveness of these methods will not match those encountered in automatic AI fraud detection applications. While such a program may have an accuracy rate of 99.8%, even the best-trained employees will not achieve accuracy higher than 95%. The difference may seem small at first glance, but the consequences can be enormous, as any successful fraud attempt on your venture may represent the end of your long-term ambitions.
A Necessary Investment
High-quality payment fraud detection applications are not free. But the financial protection they bring to companies makes them pay for themselves. Are you active in a competitive field where reputation is the differentiating factor between firms? If so, a fraud attempt that passes the vigilance of your staff would destroy not only the economic growth prospects of your venture but also your brand’s market recognition. Would you seek the services of a company that does not take its financial security seriously? Probably not, and your customers think the same.
Investing in a payment fraud analytics application is a way to stay one step ahead of bad actors. Moreover, it is perhaps the most efficient way to comply with the regulatory practices active in your industry, and it’s a sure way to increase employee productivity and automate tasks that will otherwise fall on their shoulders. High-quality fraud detection applications yield significant long-term savings, can give you a financial advantage over your rivals, are a way to keep abreast of technological advances, and are increasingly common tools utilized in international markets.