Becoming a ‘PayFac’ or Payments Facilitator is a growing trend within the SaaS industry. The reason this is happening is that SaaS vendors whose client’s process significant funds represent a real revenue opportunity for SaaS vendors. If you are say a hotel booking software company and you charge your customers an average of $150 and the hotel turns over $10,000 per month in payments taking 60-100 basis points will net a cool $60-$100 in incremental revenue per month. It’s a quite significant shift in business models for SaaS companies and I think is good for their customers as they are closel ..read more

If you are a business and you take card payments online you are required to complete a PCI-DSS self-assessment. Why? And who actually completes these ridiculously long questionnaires? What is PCI-DSS The ‘Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard’ (PCI DSS) is a set of policies and procedures intended to improve or optimise the security of credit, debit and cash card transactions and protect cardholders against misuse of their personal information. That’s what the original intent was or at least how it was marketed. For the vast majority of merchants it’s a self-assessment questionaire tha ..read more

One thing that comes up every so often is how to effectively analyse a large selection of transaction data for the purpose of understanding how fraudulent transactions are still occurring. How to find the causes of fraud The starting point for any good financial investigation as well noted in the popular movie The Big Short is to go into the transaction row-level data. No amount of general reporting from an analyst or payments system is going to get to the level of granularity you will need to really find the issues at play. Common reasons you might have payments fraud There are usually a few ..read more

These are the main payment industry reports of 2021. We’ll update these as we find more. The 2021 McKinsey Global Payments Report The Global Payment Report (WorldPay) Global Payments 2021: All in for growth (BCG) – No registration required World Payments Report 2021 (Banking Circle) World Payments Report 2021 (Cap Gemini) The post Links to the key 2021 Payments Reports appeared first on First Six Last Four ..read more

Hi, name is Duncan Malcolm. I convene First Six Last Four to help us understand more about fraud threats and the things that we can do to reduce our risk in the face of highly motivated adversaries. In this series we are going to look at the main ways to detect and identify potential fraudsters as well as critically how to know if we’re under a specific fraud attack. When trying to identify fraud there are several approaches which can be employed to detect fraudulent users. These are: {behaviour} The customers are doing something different to normal customers {links} We’ve linked the customer ..read more

This guide has been developed for eCommerce merchants with any level of fraud knowledge. It aims to provide a full and comprehensive overview of how to detect and prevent eCommerce payment fraud. Getting fraud prevention and detection right is important. However, if you are a growing merchant and have zero fraud, there is a strong possibility that you are rejecting good customers. Get it wrong the other way and let too many risky transactions through, and you will eat into your margins. In this guide we cover eCommerce Payment Fraud Trends Payment Fraud Key Concepts How payment fraud happens ..read more

Hi, name is Duncan Malcolm. I convene First Six Last Four to help us understand more about fraud threats and the things that we can do to reduce our risk in the face of highly motivated adversaries. In this post we are looking at different checks and fraud data vendors. These checks can happen without interruption to the customer journey and can provide a lot of data that you can use in your fraud scoring. We will look at data you can obtain around: IP address’s Email address’s Phone numbers eVerification of identify Devices (fingerprinting) Individually any of the above are not very helpful ..read more

Hi, name is Duncan Malcolm. I convene First Six Last Four to help us understand more about fraud threats and the things that we can do to reduce our risk in the face of highly motivated adversaries. In this series we are going to look at the main ways to detect and identify potential fraudsters as well as critically how to know if we’re under a specific fraud attack. These are: {behaviour} The customers are doing something different to normal customers; {links} We’ve linked the customer to a transaction that has received a chargeback; {features} The customer in different in some way to our re ..read more

Hi, name is Duncan Malcolm. I convene First Six Last Four to help us understand more about fraud threats and the things that we can do to reduce our risk in the face of highly motivated adversaries. In this post I will explore some of the techniques to detect and understand payment fraud attacks. We will cover: Introduction Fraud attack detection Physical vs non-physical products Common fraud patterns Think like your adversary ****************** ****************** Technology failures The right way to think payment risk Introduction A fraud attack is defined as an elevated period of f ..read more

Hi, name is Duncan Malcolm. I convene First Six Last Four to help us understand more about fraud threats and the things that we can do to reduce our risk in the face of highly motivated adversaries. In this series we are going to look at the main ways to detect and identify potential fraudsters as well as critically how to know if we’re under a specific fraud attack. We've decided that this post has content that is too sensitive to be publicly available. If you work in fraud at a merchant you can apply for access and we'll get you approved asap. You'll get access to this and all the other lock ..read more