Emailage: Partnerships Are Key To FinServ Growth

A few years back, when Emailage was one of the first companies to talk about the importance of the email layer in risk assessment. The conversation has changed since then — most notably, through the addition of many more voices.

“We’re seeing a major paradigm shift in the space today,” observed Chief Partnership Officer Tim White, who was promoted this month from executive VP of global partnerships. “There was a time when the device layer was a nice-to-have; now it’s a must. That same shift is happening with email in risk assessment.”

White said the growth of interest has challenged the startup to serve more companies in more places, and to do so faster than ever. This, in turn, has forced the company to grow and expand. It recently opened offices in Australia, Singapore, and Canada — and is adding team members to support even greater expansion (with White’s new role slated to oversee some of these).

However, White said, the key strategic shift has been away from doing things on an account-by-account basis and toward the ability to do embedded solutions with partnerships. The focus, he said, has been on identifying partners that the startup hopes to support by mobilizing its teams, with an eye to international expansion over the past year.

White noted that the business-to-business (B2B) space is often seen as less personal than its consumer-facing counterpart business-to-consumer (B2C). However, trust is a pillar in this space, too, he said. Strong, direct relationships are an important part of forging and maturing partnerships to foster growth.

The account-by-account approach worked in the past, said White, because the fraud prevention space had not yet realized the value of an email-based risk assessment approach. Now that that’s changing, the time and costs associated with a large volume of individual acquisitions are too great to be considered practical anymore. Embedding a solution into a partner’s ecosystem means the startup can realize growth without the prohibitive time and costs associated with it, he said. Volume is possible on day one.

White noted it’s not just Emailage that’s putting an emphasis on partnerships first. Across the FinServ spectrum, he said that going into any venture with a partner can expedite the sales cycle. Direct relationships create a direct path to growth.

In addition to growing and expanding its global partnership team, Emailage has also been making the conference rounds, with a presence at the Card-Not-Present (CNP) Expo in Orlando Florida, the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) in Dublin, and VTEX Day, and Cards Future Payment.

The startup has also been working on key product updates and strategic hires, which it plans to announce in June.