Challenges in fraud prevention
Fraudulent activities have evolved with the advancement of technology, making it difficult for businesses to keep up. Traditional #fraud prevention methods often rely on manual reviews or rules-based systems, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error. With the increasing volume of online transactions, businesses need a more efficient and effective way to detect and prevent fraud.
Understanding Verifi Order Insight
Verifi Order Insight is what we like to call a post-authorization (or post-auth) product. That means that by using this system the merchant does not deny any transactions during the sales process, but instead we intercept the possible fraud as it enters the chargeback process. Order Insight is the first step of this process. Order Insight allows the merchant to collaborate with the card issuer in real time during a customer service phone call when a card holder is asking for more information about a transaction. This is a very effective place in the customer journey to stop many types of Friendly Fraud.
What is Friendly Fraud?
Many disputes are caused by friendly fraud. This is a type of fraud where the merchant “knows” the person placing the order, or at least they think they know them. That’s why its called “friendly fraud”. At Fraud Deflect, we’ve coined the term, “Communication ‘Fraud’” as a sub-set of this. We find that a large portion of many merchants’ disputes are due to miscommunication. A major factor in this is a combination of misalignment of marketing, sales, order pages and follow up after the sale.
Examples of Friendly Fraud include situations where one authorized user makes a purchase and then poorly communicates this with the card holder paying the bill, or where the description of the purchase is not clear on the card statement. Other examples could be where a parent let’s a child buy something online, maybe in a video game, and then the card gets stored in the game and let’s the child continue to purhcase. Another likely culprit is if you buy something online and do not realize you have signed up for a subscription.
In all of these examples, the cardholder may not remember or think its actually fraud since they don’t recognize the charge.
How does Verifi Order Insight help prevent this?
When the cardholder calls their issuing bank then the first thing the operator does is look up the transaction. Once this happens, if the merchant is enrolled in our service, then we receive an API call asking for more information about the transaction. This information then shows up, in less than a second, in the credit card company’s CRM for the customer support representative to convey to the card holder. So now, instead of some very short (22 characters max) descriptor, the merchant can actually provide a full shopping cart, a paragraph description of what was purchased, email address, url, account id, and much more.
At that point ideally, the card hold realizes this is a purchase that they approved and will then not go through with a chargeback, thus saving the merchant chargeback fees, loss of the sale revenue, possible additional fines from the card brands and lots of stress.
What kind data is needed to be shared with the issuer?
Order Insight does require sharing data with the credit card issuer. What data is mostly up to the merchant. There are some requirements such as a description of what was purchased, merchant name, store name (that the consumer would recognize), customer service phone number. Additionally we recommend providing information like the name of the person who purchased, delivery address (if shipped), account id (that the user would know), email address, refund status (if one was issued), tracking info (if shipped), order amount, currency, and ip address or device fingerprint. Finally, we like to include any communications between the customer and the merchant.
Is integration difficult? Sounds like it with all this data…
Probably the hardest part of this product is the integration. Most merchants have the needed data and the fraud team wants the service, but its so hard to get technical resources and priority among other departments. That’s where Fraud Deflect comes in. Our system keeps it simple. We have many ways to get this data such as existing (or new) integrations with popular CRMs (like Konnecktive, Sticki.io), gateways (NMI, FluidPay), payment providers (Stripe) where we can gather merchant info, to APIs the merchant can integrate to or even just using file uploads every few days. One way or another, we can get the data that is needed and serve it up fast to Visa so that the issuer can help you save that sale.
Conclusion
Verifi Order Insight as a key component of the Fraud Deflect suite of tools that helps merchants to stop friendly fraud and chargebacks while in the dispute process. We have been involved since the beginning, when it was called Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry (VMPI) and thus know it inside and out. Based on this experience, we understand how to optimize a merchant’s results and make Order Insight a winning part of the customer experience and save a merchant a lot of sales and prevent a lot of chargebacks. Even low risk merchants should use this product since it can be looked at as part of customer service and as providing a great experience for your customers.