Signifyd Fights Fraud With Social Media, Big Data

Signifyd, a new platform that provides fraud protection has launched an e-commerce service designed to assess suspect transactions, and to mitigate wrongfully declined purchases.

Risk management and big data go hand-in-hand. The company, which has raised $2 million in funding, boasts talent from the risk management divisions of both PayPal and FedEx. The unique idea behind Signifyd is that it actually leverages the largest source of data available – social media.

The company provides plugins for e-commerce sites such as Magento, and Shopify, and also an API which sends customer data to Signifyd to analyze.

Signifyd parses both the customer’s online and offline information to accurately evaluate the validity of their purchase.

Each transaction is evaluated and scored based on a customer’s online and offline data. The algorithm, which checks to see if these sets of data match, finds the identity of the cardholder on social media, and other relevant online presences, and assigns the transaction a score.

Some of the information includes data from Facebook, Twitter, search results, public records, issuing bank data, and purchasing history.

The higher the score, the more likely the purchase is legitimate.

The information available to the public through social media is truly staggering, and using it to build a customer profile is clever - if not a bit creepy.

For merchants however, especially those with higher volumes, Signifyd claims it can cut down on chargebacks, decrease the rejection of falsely flagged fraudulent transactions, and reduce the amount of time spent manually checking transactions.

All this leads to higher revenue, and can be an attractive option for merchants looking for a way to combat the growing threat of fraud.