BillGuard Acts As Antivirus For The Disease Of Fraud

Today, it’s easier than ever for new merchants to create business accounts and follow their dreams, whether that means opening up a food truck that specializes in authentic Mexican food or creating the next big retail eCommerce brand.

Just last week, big-time mobile players PayPal, Groupon and Square all released updates for their existing MPOS systems with the goal of improving the shopping experience for customers while enabling more businesses to start from the ground up with little overhead.

But, while this environment is conducive to the goals of aspiring business moguls, consumers are facing new challenges due to the complexities of billing statements that are increasingly cluttered with a host of unfamiliar businesses. This may not seem like a big deal until you consider that some of these charges could be fraudulent. And if left unchecked, consumers who aren’t vigilant could end up paying the price.

Founded in April 2010, BillGuard began with the goal of providing consumers with an easy solution to this challenge, one that’s powered by a concept so simple, similar systems have been in place for over a decade.

To talk about the future of transaction verification, PYMNTS.com spoke to Yaron Samid, the CEO of the New York-based company that’s calling itself the “antivirus for our bills.”

Samid echoed most of these concerns, saying that he believes more and more consumers are falling victim to “cryptic” and “hard-to-read” billing descriptions that contain “gray charges,” the company’s term for bills that were unsolicited or unwanted.

“And a lot of them are merchants who have nefarious or malicious intent,” Samid said in an interview. “They intend to get a bunch of credit cards and charge them not for specifically what the customer wanted, but for things that they can get away with by simply either hiding them in the Terms of Service, putting them somewhere, you know, in small gray font at the bottom of a website, wherever it might be.”

Due to the wider array of merchants, he says, consumers need the help of “definitive metrics” that can measure the “reliability of transactions,” so that they can more easily repair any damage done to their finances. Likewise, to contribute to the solution, the service needs to be easy for consumers to understand. That’s why BillGuard sorts all transactions on a consumer’s account into OK, unsure or flagged categories.

Samid also noted that businesses aren’t immune to the ramifications of an increasingly cluttered marketplace, stating that, “they end up paying tens of millions of dollars a year in handling inquiries and disputes that are related to gray charges.”

BillGuard, Samid says, can determine the reliability of consumer and merchant transactions by “harnessing this collective human knowledge about bad charges versus good charges.”

But how exactly does BillGuard ensure these results?

“What we’re able to do is provide real state-of-the-art transaction monitoring technology that is able to identify similar gray charges in transaction data and then proactively notify consumers about these charges, and also help them resolve those charges directly with the merchant,” Samid said.

In this way, he says, his company was inspired by the spam industry. But how exactly did BillGuard apply emails lessons to bank accounts? And how does the company plan to further its goal of protecting American consumers over the next six months?

To get a more comprehensive introduction to BillGuard and hear more about the company’s assessment of the current market and its plans for expansion, listen to our full podcast here.

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Yaron Samid
CEO, BillGuard

BillGuard CEO Yaron Samid has been building successful consumer-empowering products and companies since 1997. A three-time entrepreneur, Yaron is driven by the privilege to better people’s lives by combining his passions for disruptive Internet technologies and user experience design. BillGuard is a labor of love. Yaron previously co-founded Pando and DeskSite, bringing his award-winning products to over 50M users worldwide. Yaron also held senior product management and marketing positions at BackWeb, Zend and Register.com and currently serves on the boards of Pond5 and cloud data security leader CloudLock. In 2012 New York’s Mayor Bloomberg honored Yaron with the prestigious NYC Venture Fellow Award for entrepreneurial achievement. Yaron has been featured in the The Economist, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, New York Times and Forbes, and is a personal finance security contributor on ABC News, Fox News and AP News.