Providerless: Solving the Unknown Unknown — Raphael Lawson

“It’s easy to stop all fraud. Just don’t make any sales.” This truism in our industry always gets a wry smile, because it’s so true. The challenge of fraud prevention is not blocking fraud; it’s blocking fraud without turning away good business.

As we all know, the potential cost to the business of being risk-averse is higher than the amount generally lost to fraud. We’re always stuck between a rock and a hard place.

At The Hut Group we take this particularly seriously because we focus so much on providing an ideal customer experience. False declines are the absolute opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.

The reason I became interested in the providerless trend was not actually as a fraud fighting tool, per se. What drew me in was the hope that providerless would be able to help avoid false declines.

After all if a network can develop a reliable consensus about good customers, based on their histories and their ongoing interactions with numerous sites and apps, then maybe we could protect those customers from the annoyance and frustrations of a false decline.

I’m certainly not dismissing the importance of preventing fraud, which remains the core of my role.

But in my opinion, our industry’s great challenge for the coming decade is going to be dealing with the problem of false declines.

To do that, we should be looking beyond current practices to see what new ideas and technologies may be able to benefit us, our companies and our customers.

About Raphael

Raphael Lawson has been fighting fraud in diverse industries for fifteen years. As Group Head of Fraud at The Hut Group, he has developed the company’s fraud protections to support its massive growth, while at the same time guarding against loss from fraud. He oversees predictive research, fraud management tools and systems, false positive prevention and chargeback management for THG’s varied brands. Raphael has a Masters in Applied Criminology.

This article was originally published in “How Providerless Technology is Changing the Way We Validate Identities Online.” You can read further articles by other industry experts in the same eBook, here.

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