Emailage | Post Money2020 Q&A

Fintech Finance Q&A

Author: Chris Thomas, General Manager EMEA, Emailage

1. Can you tell us about Emailage, your expertise and the industry in which you operate?

The Emailage team has a single goal: to unite businesses of all sizes in the fight against global fraud. Historically, companies relied on siloed technologies and databases to incorporate email into their fraud tools, consisting of inaccurate and highly manual processes. For example, one-to-one comparisons and maintenance of internal blacklists costing hours of precious resource.

Founded in 2012, Emailage has changed the global fraud landscape, breaking these silos with a secure, reliable, and multi-layered fraud data collaboration network. We are a global leader in online fraud prevention and email risk assessment. We combine key partnerships, proprietary data, and machine-learning (ML) technology into a multi-dimensional profile associated with a customer’s email address. This profile is then calculated into a reliable multifactor predictive risk score delivered to our customers within seconds.

Customers see significant savings from identifying and stopping fraudulent transactions through stopped orders, unrecoverable fraud losses and chargeback fees. We have helped companies across the world mitigate over $4bn worth of fraudulent purchases through our solution and our ongoing dedication to unite companies in the fight against fraud. Our network’s constant growth enables 90 per cent of fraud detected to be driven by attributes coming from our proprietary algorithms.

Emailage works across seven key industries, including: eCommerce; financial; technology; travel and hospitality; iGaming; event ticketing; and lending. We are trusted by one of the ‘big four’ U.S. banks, four of the top 10 global retailers, three of the top five largest global airlines, the top three PC manufacturers, three of the top six credit card issuers, three of the top five marketplace lenders, the top four money transfer providers and three of the top five travel websites.

2. How does Emailage differentiate itself in today’s market

We are the only company in the world to specifically use email addresses to create a powerful risk score that helps businesses predict and prevent fraud with pinpoint accuracy. We identified a gap in the market for identifying fraud. We noticed every transaction made online necessitated an email address and we found many companies assumed email addresses were only useful for customer notifications and marketing campaigns. However, we knew there was much more behind the email address. We unlocked its power to change the way businesses prevent fraud.

In the last 12 months, we’ve helped one of our customers, a reputable global retailer, prevent a staggering $19 million in fraud as well as increase revenue by reducing operational costs associated with manual review.

3. . What do you see as the current fraud trends in the financial services industry?

Fraud is no longer made up of just amateur fraudsters operating solo. It is a multi-million-dollar industry, with criminals across the globe organising on an industrial scale to defraud businesses and consumers because it makes them more money. Further, global fraud organisations stay local to areas where legislation has not caught up with the sophisticated digital crimes they are committing, meaning it is increasingly tougher to prosecute them.

The negative impact of online fraud has huge societal impacts – fraudulently acquired streams of income can be used to fund other criminal activities like money laundering which can then lead to funds for drugs, human trafficking and other illegal trades.

We ar seeing another rapidly growing concern called an account takeover. This type of fraud occurs when a fraudster obtains valid credentials to takeover an online account. This type of fraud increased by 120 per cent between 2016 and 2017, and Emailage has committed time, effort and expertise to create the most effective solutions to combat this type of fraud.

Regulations like PSD2 are vital to increasing innovation and decreasing fraud across all sectors including financial services. For example, strong customer authentication (SCA), within PSD2, is requiring merchants to build additional authentication into their checkout processes. It must include, in any combination, at least two elements – something the customer knows (password or PIN); something the customer has (phone or hardware token); something the customer is (fingerprint or face recognition). PSD2 and SCA are critical steppingstones to ending fraud – or at least slowing it down.

4. What are your future goals for Emailage?

We have experienced strong growth over the last 12 months, opening offices in EMEA, APAC, and broadened our reach in North America and LATAM, giving us a global presence but local expertise.  Our goal is to continue this expansion and help reduce fraud for businesses of all types globally, while at the same time tailoring our solution to mitigate fraud according to the highly specific regional trends.

Different businesses across the globe experience their own unique fraud challenges, and our approach is to build teams in those regions to not only educate companies but to support them in their fight to mitigate fraud.