Mastercard Teams With Riskified to Reduce eCommerce Fraud

Riskified and Mastercard have teamed to help businesses increase eCommerce revenues while reducing fraud.

The partnership, announced Thursday (Aug. 17), marries insights from Mastercard’s cybersecurity products and solutions with Riskified’s transaction and identity network.

In addition, it offers access to Mastercard’s suite of tools that allow for real-time alerts on chargeback events and automated dispute resolution.

“This global partnership with Mastercard highlights the measurable impact Riskified makes on merchant revenues and profitability,” said Kevin Sprake , vice president, global channel partnerships at Riskified.

Per the news release, Riskified’s machine learning platform offers merchant fraud teams “highly accurate,” automated risk-decisioning for eCommerce sales.

The partnership is happening at a time when the rise of omnichannel commerce has presented new opportunities to merchants and fraudsters alike, Adam Gunther , senior vice president and chief product officer at Kount , an Equifax Company, told PYMNTS earlier this month.

“There are new fraud and theft vectors ,” he said, as well as an uptick in disputes and chargebacks as fraudsters continue to try to make off illicitly obtained goods.

Among the situations that could lead to chargebacks include children making unauthorized purchases on a parent’s device, or a would-be thief trying to pick up a customer’s online package order in-store.

Kount, for its part, had seen merchants grapple with these new vectors as consumers were filing disputes for these (and other) varied reasons, when not all that long ago, the vast majority of disputes had been registered as a result of real or suspected fraud.

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that, as Gunther noted, “We’re seeing a lot of merchants that are new to eCommerce — they may have in the past relied on a brick-and-mortar store … and now they are starting from scratch in doing business this way [online]. And small businesses are the ones that are really without sophisticated protection.”

Riskified’s partnership with Mastercard follows its integration with commercetools’ eCommerce platform earlier this month.

As noted here, this integration allows merchants using commercetools to battle payment fraud while making sure customers have a frictionless experience.

“Merchants should never have to choose between stopping fraud and offering legitimate customers a friction-free experience, yet retailers often face this hurdle,” Sprake said.