Stripe Buys Bouncer To Aid In Fraud Prevention

Stripe, the tech company working on economic infrastructure for the internet, will acquire Bouncer, a press release says.

Bouncer has card-scanning and risk technology which it uses to help businesses cut down on fraud and authenticate cards.

Under the agreement, the release says Stripe will merge Bouncer’s team with its own. The agreement will help to boost the capabilities of Radar, the Stripe product utilizing machine learning to prevent fraud.

Radar, which the release says is fully integrated with the Stripe platform, will identify specific transactions as high-risk and will now use Bouncer’s technology for card scanning and verification to authenticate that a customer had a legitimate card in their hand when they made a purchase.

According to Simon Arscott, business lead for Stripe Radar, Bouncer is a “great tool” allowing companies to make sure transactions are legitimate.

“With the addition of advanced card-scanning capabilities, Stripe Radar will be able block more fraud and further increase revenue for millions of businesses around the world who rely on Stripe,” he said, according to the release.

ECommerce, which saw huge gains worldwide as the pandemic made it more feasible to shop through one’s mobile phone or laptop rather than going outside, is forecasted to keep growing. PYMNTS writes that the value of that market is likely to be $4.5 trillion by the end of 2021. Right now it’s worth around $3.9 trillion, which is a huge boost from $1.3 trillion in 2014.

Fraud will continue to be an issue, though, with online merchants seeing an average of 344 fraud attempts per month last year. That was a 24 percent increase from the previous year.

That comes as fraud prevention attempts have been less effective, too.

The difficulty for many eCommerce firms in the U.S. comes when it’s time to properly authenticate customers, which can be tough for many of them — 58 percent say they can’t verify mobile users as well as they’d like.