Webinar: How to Fight Identity Fraud by Going Providerless

Melisande Mual, editor of The Paypers, discussed why the providerless trend is starting to catch on in the fraud prevention industry in a webinar with Identiq’s own Uri Arad and Shmuli Goldberg.

Providerless is one of the hottest trends in the fraud prevention industry, which is interesting in itself because until recently online fraud protection has always been based around a reliance on working with third party data providers (like Equifax and Experian etc.). In fact, during the webinar Uri reminisced about his days at PayPal and the investment his team put into trying to find the best data sources for their needs.

Within that context, the industry’s surprising willingness to reimagine how we verify identities online shows how important accurate identity validation is for so many companies today.

Why Providerless Is Catching On

Ever since the early days of e-commerce, companies have faced the challenge of how to tell whether a user is who they say they are. Lacking information on new users, or new details added by a user, they have had to rely on third parties to help validate user identities. And that meant exposing user data to those third party data aggregators.

The webinar “How to Fight Identity Fraud by Going Providerless” explored the pros and cons of the traditional model. It also looked at some of the changes in the fraud ecosystem, and in the data privacy landscape, which has led to many companies beginning to look at different models for identity verification — among them, going providerless.

Melisande, Uri and Shmuli discussed how in some ways the providerless trend has grown out of the desire to collaborate that has always been present in the fraud prevention industry. Collaboration has always been seen as valuable in the ongoing battle to keep up with fraudsters who often work together, and who frequently attack multiple sites in a single industry in quick succession.

However, until the providerless trend began, collaboration was typically limited to sharing best practices and high level trends — even though the day-to-day job of fraud prevention happens on the data level. The only commonly used form of data-level collaboration, sharing blacklists, is hardly more effective than sharing best practices, since fraudsters run through email addresses (and IPs, and devices…) faster than sand running through an hourglass. This is also a problem with third party data aggregators; their data is often out-of-date or incomplete.

Providerless data — taking data providers out of the equation and relying on a network of peers and their fresh, holistic user information — grew naturally out of these elements:

• The need to collaborate against sophisticated fraudsters — even on a data level
• The need for consistently reliable, accurate, fresh data
• The need to provide a great experience for the majority; good, legitimate users
• The disinclination to share user data with third parties like Equifax, even in order to fight fraud

The webinar looked at what the providerless trend means for fraud prevention teams today, and how they can leverage providerless options to create a hybrid provider-providerless system to catch fraud faster, reduce false positives, and improve customer experience online.

It also considered the option of a privacy-first providerless option, where anonymity is built in from the ground up and no sensitive user information is shared.

If you missed the webinar, you can find the recording here.