Buyer’s Guide: Building Digital Trust and Safety Through Trusted Identities

The dramatic shift to online shopping means retailers see their customers less than they ever have. Additionally, with daily data breaches and lax password security, account credentials are readily available for purchase.

This is a boon to fraudsters looking to pose as legitimate customers. So good in fact, that from 2019 to 2021, identity theft increased 81.8% globally. For too long, organizations have played defense and responded to suspicions of fraud reactively. It’s time to start establishing digital trust with customers early in the journey, just like retailers would do in the day when they knew their customers personally.

Identity is at the root of all fraud. Merchants that can safely trust their customers' identities will reap the benefits. First, they can greatly reduce the impact of fraud on the business. Second, they have more—and better—data for reducing customer friction, increasing loyalty and targeting sales or marketing efforts more effectively.

So how can merchants know for certain a customer is who they claim to be?

Traditional identity verification (IDV) solutions validate some customer attributes, but these are no longer enough to establish trust. To establish that an identity can truly be trusted, it’s imperative to take a more holistic look and verify the connections between that data and the person claiming to be a customer.

Professional fraudsters can try to impersonate legitimate customers, but they can’t create trusted identities. Even synthetic identities fail when exposed to this scrutiny.

This is why trusted identities offer a safer approach to IDV. By identifying trust, the company focuses less on behaviors and more on the individual making purchases.

Wix helps people create professional websites to manage and grow their businesses, providing a world-class platform to over 234 million users in 190 countries. Wix’s merchants use the platform to build and run digital storefronts - collecting payments through Wix Payments. 

This setup is great for Wix’s users, but comes with challenges on the side of fraud and risk. Wix needs to validate merchants to prevent seller fraud, and help merchants to ensure that their customers are legitimate as well. All without contributing off-putting friction for merchants or customers. Adding to the challenge, Wix aims for zero false declines. 

Intrigued by how they pull this off? Attend this session to find out how, using an anonymous identity validation network, they put into practice their motto that success on one side supports success everywhere in the business.

Fraudsters look for the easiest, most vulnerable parts of the transaction lifecycle to enter the customer journey.

Traditional verification steps, such as verifying micro-deposits, are not enough. Every participant in the transaction lifecycle – from merchant to payment processor to card issuer – must understand their vulnerability to account takeover fraud. All need a strategy for verifying identity that makes it much more difficult for fraudsters to use the identity data they obtain.

This presentation explores how transaction participants can create strategies to verify identities starting with account creation, and extending through checkout, payment, shipping, and account maintenance. It will also provide a merchant's perspective on effective pathways for safeguarding in-demand eCommerce options such as guest checkout.

It is important to identify who your fraudsters are as well as their goals.

This presentation explores the variety of fraud methods which are seen in our industry, including affiliate fraud, bot attacks, phishing and romance scams, what fraud identification and mitigation tools are used, and how they could be applied to other eCommerce and digital goods businesses.

Learn how "Sandbox" payments, a fabricated payment process applied to fraudsters, which deceives them into believing a transaction was successful, can help to reduce fraud and chargebacks.

Discover how to reduce and automate manual reviews to provide an improved and more efficient experience for genuine customers.

ATO's (or account takeovers) are not a new method, however these methods have been seen more and more in the last couple years.

What is it?

• An "account takeover" is the term applied to the fraud method wherein a unauthorized user gains access to an established account. This is done in many different ways, and with many different intentions in mind.

Why is this valuable to a fraudster?

• Different industries offer perks to account holders in different ways. The value of these offerings is what fraudsters are after.

• Once an ATO exploit has proven successful, the method becomes a standard operation for identity criminals until it no longer works.

Who does it Affect?

• Depending on the type of account, the affected entity will change:
• Banks account will be drained over time, but the true account holder can report that losses and recover funds.
• Conversely, crypto accounts are not as forgiving.
• Merchant account profiles that are used to process stolen payment information will affect the merchant by way of chargebacks.

Now, the Prevention Strategy

• Data is your friend when seeking to identify ATOs early on.
• Expansive datasets include PII, Biometrics, Behavioral Analytics, Device Fingerprinting and more.

Learning Objectives:

After attending this webinar, attendees will learn why ATO is valuable to fraudsters, how ATO works, who ATO affects, and how to prevent ATO with online identity.

Identity underlies every transaction. With rising levels of fraud, false declines, and chargebacks, it's time to rethink the concept of "identity" within the context of digital commerce. Pipl will share why the traditional concept of identity is failing merchants, payment processors, and ecommerce customers alike—and how it should change. We'll introduce the new paradigm of trusted identity, describe what comprises trusted identities, and provide real-life examples of how trusted identities are already being used to prevent fraud, combat chargeback and friendly fraud, and extend trust into the ecommerce lifecycle.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the importance of deep connections between identity data fragments
• Identify trust signals and be able to recognize a trusted identity
• See how the concept of trusted identity is being applied across manual review, chargebacks, friendly fraud, and third-party fraud

Personal finance and investing platform FinTron caters to Gen Z—and that means meeting young users’ expectations for fast, seamless experiences. However, FinTron’s original new-account authentication process took up to 48 hours. That’s a very long time for eager new investors to wait for approval—and plenty of time for them to find an alternative app. In the early stages of implementing Deduce Identity Insights, FinTron can now access and approve qualified users in near real-time, so they can start using FinTron’s platform right away. Deduce achieves this by scoring applications as part of the signup flow and alerting FinTron’s manual review team to any that might be fraudulent, saving the team from having to manually review every new user signup. Hear from the FinTron founder and CEO, Wilder Rumpf, on how he and his team implemented a Trusted User Experience that delights his customers

Learning Objectives:

• Reduce new account creation friction
• Eliminate new account creation churn
• Identify potentially fraudulent new user activity
• Map a path to passwordless log in

Personal finance and investing platform FinTron caters to Gen Z—and that means meeting young users’ expectations for fast, seamless experiences. However, FinTron’s original new-account authentication process took up to 48 hours. That’s a very long time for eager new investors to wait for approval—and plenty of time for them to find an alternative app. In the early stages of implementing Deduce Identity Insights, FinTron can now access and approve qualified users in near real-time, so they can start using FinTron’s platform right away. Deduce achieves this by scoring applications as part of the signup flow and alerting FinTron’s manual review team to any that might be fraudulent, saving the team from having to manually review every new user signup. Hear from the FinTron founder and CEO, Wilder Rumpf, on how he and his team implemented a Trusted User Experience that delights his customers

Learning Objectives:

• Reduce new account creation friction
• Eliminate new account creation churn
• Identify potentially fraudulent new user activity
• Map a path to passwordless log in

It’s Time for a New Approach: Digital trust and safety is shaping up to become a critical, revolutionary issue for online organizations, communities and everyday users. The online world depends on being able to move forward with trusted interactions, which are only possible when you know who is real and who isn’t. The value of trust far outweighs the cost of fraud. Organizations that can successfully identify trust in online interactions will improve the customer experience and strengthen brand loyalty while extending customer lifetime value.

At the core of trust in online engagements is digital identity verification. And at the core of identity verification is identity trust. If a user’s identity can’t be verified, how can that user be trusted? Even with verified identities, it’s even more important to establish that the individual behind the identity can be trusted. This guide provides best practices any organization can follow to develop effective trust and safety initiatives to protect their platform and their users.

KYC has its roots in the early 2000s in an effort to make it much more difficult for criminals to launder money through banks, insurers, and adjacent institutions, as well as to stop terrorism funding. However this approach has been made more and more difficult to help online businesses verify fraudsters.

Combined with social media lookup and strict KYC checks, we'll be looking at how we can implement better restrictions of fraudsters and help AML efforts.