DataVisor in 2019: The Year in Review
In a year of transformation and evolution, AI went from luxury to necessity as online threats worsened and companies embraced new solutions. Looking back on 12 months of opportunity and success, we celebrate client results, company awards, conferences, product launches, and more, in this 2019 retrospective.
2019 has been a year of remarkable transition and evolution. We’ve seen industries and organizations grow at unprecedented rates, and witnessed the positive impact of technology’s ever-accelerating innovations. We’ve also seen the dark side of progress, as data breaches, bot attacks, and online threats have continued to worsen. Today, transformational technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are no longer luxuries but necessities. Modern threat attacks are so fast-moving, so adaptive, and so massive, businesses simply cannot afford to go without advanced AI-powered solutions — the financial and reputational risks are too great.
DataVisor entered 2019 uniquely positioned to address these continuously evolving threats, and after twelve months of working to protect businesses, their customers, and their data, with the world’s foremost AI-powered threat protection solutions, we now have the opportunity to look back on all that’s transpired.
Year-end posts sometimes have the air of the obligatory about them, but in truth, the work of assembling this kind of retrospective is a uniquely powerful experience. When discussing DataVisor’s approach to threat protection, we often talk about how holistic data analysis can reveal patterns and connections not discernible when reviewing accounts and transactions in isolation. The same can be said about the process of reviewing an entire year’s worth of activity all at once — you see things differently when looking at the bigger picture because somehow, you never quite realize the magnitude or import of your efforts when you’re in the middle of the action.
We hope you enjoy this look back at 2019 as much as we have! Let’s get started.
January
We jumped right into the fray of the new year with a predictions post on January 1st. Our first prediction?
“#1 Convergence towards data intelligence
In 2019, the emphasis will be on drawing inferences from data to make more automated decisions with greater transparency. Particularly, when it comes to digital fraud and risk, the more domain-specific the intelligence, the more effective the solutions will be — not only for detecting and preventing known and unknown threats, but also for creating frictionless experience for the customers.”
As we later learned from our experiences at both Money2020 and MoneyLive, balancing threat protection with customer experience was definitely a signature topic in 2019!
We had occasion to celebrate two pieces of good news in January 2019: We announced our enrollment into Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA)’s SG:D Spark programme, and we won a 2019 DEVIES Award for Best Innovation in Fintech!
February
February brought with it more good news on the awards front, as DataVisor was named to the 2019 CB Insights AI 100 List of Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Startups! To add to the celebration, we earned four nods from the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards!
Probably the most exciting that happened in February, however, occurred on the very first day of the month. Mountain View, CA, officially declared February 1, 2019, as “DataVisor Day” in recognition of our company’s fifth anniversary! Mountain View Mayor Lisa Matichak even visited our offices to share the official proclamation:
March
March 2019 was a watershed moment in DataVisor history, as that’s when we officially launched our flagship product, dCube! Announcing the launch on our blog, DataVisor CEO and Co-Founder Yinglian Xie had this to say:
“As a company, DataVisor is many things. We are domain experts in the field of fraud, and our expertise informs every feature of dCube. We are engineers, dedicated to building the most powerful tools and putting control into the hands of our clients. We are researchers, tracking every development across the fraud landscape to ensure we’re delivering precisely those capabilities organizations need to stay ahead of today’s fraudsters. We are a mission-driven organization that believes every business and every customer should be able to conduct personal and financial business online free of abuse, attack, and harassment. Above all else, we are a service provider in the truest sense of the term — we serve our clients by empowering them to protect themselves from fraud.
We are proud and excited to deliver dCube as the embodiment of our commitment to defeating fraud at scale.”
That same month, we celebrated International Women’s Day with a post highlighting some of the extraordinary women working to advance DataVisor’s mission:
As exciting as the dCube launch was, it wasn’t the only big announcement we got to share in March 2019 — we were also thrilled to announce a new partnership with Microsoft:
April
DataVisor’s Q1 2019 Fraud Index Report was released in April of 2019. For the report, we analyzed over 44 billion events, 800 million users, and 396 million IP addresses!
That same month, we welcomed David Cassady as DataVisor’s new Vice President of Business Development, Partnerships, and Sales. In a post on our blog, David had this to say about the opportunity:
“Fraud is everyone’s problem, and only the most sophisticated, scalable solutions can empower organizations to stay ahead of rapidly-evolving fraud attacks. DataVisor’s AI-powered approach and use of proprietary unsupervised machine learning algorithms set the bar for delivering the kind of performance global enterprises need. I look forward to representing a truly world-changing solution.”
April was the month we launched our “This Week in Fraud Trends” series, which will celebrate its one-year anniversary on April 12, 2020. Our first ever post for the series was titled: The Breach is Just the Beginning.
Finally, as reported by VentureBeat, DataVisor was placed in the #15 spot on the Growjo Industry Awards list of Fastest Growing Companies for the IT Security Segment!
May
DataVisor was very busy out in the community in May, making appearances all over the map, and sharing our vision for a safer and more prosperous future. One experience we greatly enjoyed was the Mastercard Global Risk Leadership Conference, which began on May 7th in South Carolina:
Our CEO and Co-Founder Yinglian Xie sat down with CNA (Channel News Asia) for an interview in May:
Yinglian additionally appeared on a Gender in STEM panel at the EPIC Stanford China Education Forum, and her Co-Founder Fang Yu made an appearance at Stanford as well:
DataVisor’s Director of Research Ting-Fang also made an important conference appearance in May, when she spoke at the Strata Data Conference. You can see her full talk “Talking to the Machines: Monitoring Production Machine Learning Systems” here. Ting-Fang’s article “Anatomy of a Fraudster — How Bad Actors Are Outsmarting Conventional Prevention” was additionally published by insideBIGDATA in May.
Finally, we celebrated wonderful client results with the release of a new case study:
Among the highlights? 25% additional fraud captured, 94% detection accuracy, and savings of over $15 million!
June
June of 2019 brought more industry recognition for DataVisor, as we were named a Top 45 Artificial Intelligence Company by Datamation!
June was also the month we attended Money2020 in Amsterdam, which was a fantastic experience! Here is DataVisor CEO Yinglian Xie with VP Priya Rajan, enjoying the conference from the vantage point of Booth V20:
And here is Yinglian on stage during her panel:
DataVisor’s research made a cameo appearance in June is well, as, just in advance of our Q2 2019 Fraud Index Report’s release, CyberScoop published an insightful post titled When Your Apps Are Dormant, You Become A More Likely Target For Crooks which drew on findings from the soon-to-be-released report.
June additionally afforded us another opportunity to celebrate some outstanding client results:
Highlights included a 20% increase in detection accuracy, and the blocking of 90% of malicious accounts before any attacks even launched!
July
If we were excited in March of 2019 about the groundbreaking launch of dCube, we were positively over the moon in July, as it was announced that dCube had won the award for ‘Best AI-Based Solution for Fraud Management’ at the 2019 AI Breakthrough Awards!
“The mission of the AI Breakthrough Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the creativity, hard work, and success of companies, technologies, and products in the field of Artificial Intelligence.”
In July, we officially released our Q2 2019 Fraud Index Report. Among our findings were these 3 Must-Know Data Points:
- 65% of accounts compromised in ATO attacks are accounts that have not been logged into for more than 90 days. The fact that the accounts are dormant means the ATO is not likely to be noticed by the users, as they’re not actively monitoring their accounts.
- 20% of compromised accounts were accessed within 300 miles of the account owner’s geographic location. By engaging in behavior that more closely mimics normal user behavior (e.g., making “regional” transactions), fraudsters are more likely to avoid being detected.
- 72% of compromised financial accounts are used to make fraudulent transactions within one hour of compromise. Fraudsters want to make the most of compromised accounts while they can, so they act fast to extract maximum value.
We concluded the month with an outstanding Quora session hosted by DataVisor Co-Founder and CTO Fang Yu, in which she tackled tough questions like these:
- How are criminals using stolen data?
- What does “fraud” most commonly look like today?
- How is digital fraud becoming more sophisticated as technology continues to advance?
We also celebrated more great results for our clients in July:
Performance highlights for our clients included:
- 99% of all spammers caught
- 10k+ fake reviews prevented per day
- 99.5% detection accuracy
August
Looking back on August 2019, we find DataVisor CEO Yinglian Xie busy weighing in on many issues of the day. On the 2nd day of the month, she published an article titled A Data Breach is Just the Beginning, in response to the recently broken news of the massive Capital One breach. In her post, she writes that “it’s important to remember who the real victims are — all good customers. For those customers whose data was exposed in the breach, their information is at risk of being exploited to conduct various downstream attacks, causing potentially serious damage. Other service providers could be severely impacted as well, as they face increased fraudulent account opening requests from attackers with stolen credentials or synthetic IDs.”
This wasn’t the only time Yinglian would find herself talking about credentials, identity, and authentication. For example, she could be found talking zero-factor authentication on the Emerj AI in Banking Podcast …
… as well as offering her insights to Bankrate in a post titled Two-factor Authentication For Your Financial Accounts — Here’s How Secure It Really Is.
Yinglian wasn’t the only DataVisor executive visible on the media landscape in August. VP Priya Rajan was interviewed by TechMarketers, while Co-Founder and CTO Fang Yu was featured on Apple News, providing her answer to the question What Do People Not Understand About Artificial Intelligence?
Sathya Chandran, Ph.D, Security Research Scientist at DataVisor, took on the subject of fraud and AI, in a webinar for ODSC titled “Dumb & Dumber” vs. “Ocean’s 11”: Tackling evolving, sophisticated fraud with AI.
September
September of 2019 proved to be another exciting launch month for DataVisor. The Paypers announced the release of our new Feature Platform in an article titled “Datavisor Enables Data Science And Business Teams To Build Powerful Features,” and Claire Zhou, DataVisor’s Product Marketing Manager, announced the release on the DataVisor blog, noting that “DataVisor’s Feature Platform offers the right combination of speed, production-readiness, and unrivaled domain expertise to power transformative performance.” We subsequently introduced our community to this powerful new product in a webinar hosted by DataVisor solutions architect Akshay Sharma.
In addition to the launch news, September of 2019 was an exciting month for conferences. DataVisor’s Director of Research Ting-Fang Yen gave a presentation at the O’ Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference titled “Talking To The Machines: Monitoring Production Machine Learning Systems,” while DataVisor CTO and CO-Founder Fang Yu participated in a panel at Aite’s Financial Crime Forum:
And finally, we hosted Booth 816 at the ACAMS 18th Annual AML & Financial Crime Conference in Las Vegas!
October
On October 2nd, Yinglian Xie published her inaugural Forbes Technology Council piece, titled Think Beyond The Algorithm: AI-Powered Fraud Prevention In The Digital Age. In her article, she writes that “data, domain expertise, algorithms, and the entire ecosystem of a fraud platform — from models to monitoring — are necessary to ensure total protection against every kind of attack.”
Yongxin Xi, Director of Engineering and Analytics at DataVisor, was also published in October, having been interviewed by SafetyDetectives for an article focusing on how DataVisor helps companies like Yelp and Pinterest protect themselves from fraud. One of the questions she tackles is, “How can DataVisor protect its customers from threats?” Here is how she answered it:
“We focus on providing three fundamental values. We want to provide the right technology — robust algorithms that can help detect even very sophisticated, large-scale attacks. Also, we want to offer truly flexible integration. From the moment we begin to assess their pain points and audit their existing systems, to the moment we run our first test models, to the moment we fully implement our solution, we’re working directly with our customers to provide the right solution for their organization. Finally, we want to provide an intuitive UI and a genuinely easy-to-use product.”
October was another exciting month for new products, as we announced the release of our Advanced Rules Engine (ARE). In our post introducing the ARE (Power Up Fraud Detection with DataVisor’s Advanced Rules Engine), Claire Zhou writes that “DataVisor’s Advanced Rules Engine empowers you to rapidly create and deploy intelligent rules that enable early detection and significantly improve detection results while simultaneously increasing efficiency and reducing overhead.”
The end of the month was an especially busy period, as we simultaneously announced a new partner program (as reported by PYMNTS: DataVisor Launches Partner Program To Help Fraud-Proof Larger Businesses), and attended Money2020!
You can read our conference takeaways here: Takeaways from Money2020.
November
November saw the release of our Q3 2019 Fraud Index Report, announced here:
“The proliferation of fake, abusive, fraudulent, deceptive, and toxic user-generated content can severely damage a brand. If users can no longer trust the content they engage with on a particular platform, they will eventually cease to use the platform at all. When customer churn increases, investors worry, advertisers depart, and businesses struggle. This report presents viable solutions for addressing the challenge of content abuse and offers enterprises a way to leverage the best of what user-generated content has to offer while eliminating its associated risks.”
On the heels of the report’s release came Yinglian Xie’s article for VentureBeat, which asks the question, Can Data Privacy And Data Intelligence Coexist? Her answer is an emphatic affirmative, but as she makes clear, certain things must change:
“We have to change how we approach customer data. Instead of the current ‘more is better’ approach to data acquisition, we need to focus on collecting only the minimum amount we need to remain intelligent.”
November proved to be another great month for partnerships. First off, DataVisor was extremely excited to share news of a new partnership with Experian: Experian To Leverage DataVisor’s AI Tech To Better Fight Fraud. On top of that, we announced our new partner program, ExtenD:
November, of course, marks the start of the holiday shopping season, and we sounded the warning early about holiday shopping fraud in an article for Digital Commerce 360 titled Retailers Must Be Especially Vigilant Against Fraud.
Despite the stress and activity associated with end-of-year fraud threats, we remained very thankful for the ongoing opportunity to serve our clients by protecting them against threats — so much so, in fact, that we wrote a poem about it!
December
As can hopefully be seen from the above, 2019 has been a banner year for new product releases from DataVisor, so it only seems fitting that we should celebrate one more release before we close out 2019!
Our post introducing dEdge details how companies can significantly improve detection performance by shifting focus to an earlier point along the fraud timeline:
“dEdge provides organizations with a transformational opportunity to move detection to a much earlier point along the timeline of a fraud attack — the device and browser level. The importance of collecting data at the source is that there are many layers — between data sources and applications — where a fraudster can repackage an app or manipulate data through proxies, traffic simulators, and more, to conduct fraud. dEdge empowers organizations to precisely collect data at the source to validate the legitimacy of a customer or an app, and detect malicious actors in real time, before they can cause damage.”
And of course, no December would be complete without some predictions for the new year, and that’s exactly what Yinglian Xie delivers in the following post:
She concludes her piece with these inspiring lines:
“Ultimately, what we will see in 2020 is the positive blurring of lines between customer experience and risk management. Will we see widespread acknowledgment that these are interdependent concepts, and that successful strategies to promote each are mutually beneficial. With the universal adoption of advanced machine learning capabilities, we will see enterprises across sectors successfully striking the right balance between customer service and risk.”
Will she be right? Only time will tell!
In the meantime, we’re still in the throes of the holiday shopping cycle, and it’s critical to remember that the threats don’t end on the 25th:
Conclusion
In reviewing everything that’s happened over the course of these twelve months, Yinglian’s article for VentureBeat looms especially large for the way it so compellingly condenses and clarifies where the digital economy stands as we enter the new decade:
“Businesses today want to know absolutely everything they can about a customer. Customers, however, recoil at the idea of their every move being watched, recorded, processed, and analyzed. The more data businesses collect, the more exposed customers feel, and when customer data gets stolen, everyone loses. Everyone except the criminals.
But if we’re smarter about what data we collect and how we process and analyze it, we actually don’t need anywhere near the amounts of data we think we do.”
Yinglian goes on to note that “striking the right balance between risk management, customer experience, and ethical data acquisition is critical for financial institutions in today’s digital economy.” We know firsthand from our clients, from our research, and from our data, just how true this is, and it is this understanding that undergirds our ongoing mission to protect the world against new and emerging online threats with the power of artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning.
As we prepare to close the book on 2019, and as we look ahead to a new decade, these words ring loud and clear:
“Today, we stand on the threshold of a new era, in which ethics and intelligence need not be mutually exclusive.”
Postscript
The experience of looking back over 12 months of activity is both humbling and energizing. It’s remarkable to realize just how much we’ve been able to accomplish this year, and it’s exciting to look ahead to all the new achievements to come. If there’s one word we can think of to express our feelings about 2019, it’s this one: gratitude.
We are grateful for the opportunity to serve so many wonderful clients, who, in turn, work so hard to serve their customers. To play a role in ensuring a safer and more prosperous world for all is an opportunity we never take lightly. We thank everyone in our community for affording us the opportunity to serve you, and we look forward to a fantastic decade ahead — one in which we are all able to participate in the global digital economy without fear of threats or abuse. Here’s to a safe and secure 2020!
