At times, we all think our job is difficult. The pandemic has really made some jobs a lot harder. One such job is those who protect their company from online fraudsters. The pandemic drove significant increases in online and mobile banking, along with e-commerce buying. In the expanding sea of online commerce, how do you differentiate the good consumer from the fraudster?
Hidden threats lurk behind every corner. The attack vectors are growing in size, complexity, and diversity—bots, stolen usernames/passwords, unsuspecting users who fall prey to scams, anonymity on the internet allowing criminals to masquerade as someone else, synthetic identities, and more. The list goes on and on. If that wasn’t bad enough, fraudsters have become more clever and cunning, finding new ways around existing defenses.
Key Access Points for Fraudsters
The two most vulnerable points in the online consumer journey are new account creation and account login. At account creation, companies need to verify that the person wanting to open an account is truly the person they claim to be. And at account login, companies must be able to authenticate the person logging into the account is in fact the person who created and owns the account.
Sounds simple, right? The complexities inherent within identity authentication and verification are countless and tricky. And the consequences for getting it wrong can be quite detrimental—not only for the company but for the individual customer as well.
There is no single anti-fraud tool that will protect both areas. The best fraud defense is a multi-prong, layered approach. Casting a wide net detects and prevents as much fraud as possible. But at the same time, companies must provide a great online experience for good customers with zero to minimal unnecessary friction. Talk about a delicate balancing act!
A Multi-Pronged Approach
When deploying multiple fraud tools, companies must make a fundamental decision: Either buy different point solutions and integrate them themselves or buy a multi-pronged, integrated solution. Integrating different point solutions from different vendors in a cohesive and fully functioning ecosystem is no small effort. It requires significant resources to design and implement as well as ongoing IT maintenance, both of which can be prohibitive for most firms. For instance, one vendor may have a new software release that causes the entire ecosystem to break, making it time to call in IT.
This has given rise to a new class of solutions in the market called orchestration platforms, which offer an integrated, cohesive, and modularized suite of multiple fraud tools from a single provider. The flexibility they provide is an especially attractive feature for organizations. With one up-front integration, a company can deploy one fraud tool today and add others later. The tools are pre-integrated so they work together out of the box and share data to provide a higher level of performance on the front end and greater efficiency on the back end.
Aite-Novarica Group conducted a study across 110 fintech firms in Q3 2021 asking about the level of effort to manage account opening and account login fraud. These fintech firms were divided into two camps: those whose fraud tools were integrated and those that were not. Those fintech firms leveraging integrated solutions were twice as likely to report that managing fraud was very or somewhat easy as compared to those whose fraud tools were not integrated.
In today’s increasingly complex world of managing online fraud, companies must attempt to tip the scale in their favor and get a leg up on fraudsters. Orchestration platforms provide a more agile, yet simpler way to do that. If you are responsible for protecting the digital channel for your company, look into orchestration platforms. It is time to make the fraudster’s job harder, and yours easier.
You can learn more about the power of orchestration in this webinar.
