iovation
Fighting Online Fraud with the Power of Device Reputation

In financial services, the cost of fraud is two-fold. One must first consider the hard losses that hurt the bottom line of businesses, which can vary by type of transaction. Second is the combined cost of case investigation, customer phone support, lost customers, and damage to the bank’s reputation. To collectively control these costs, financial organizations need to pinpoint fraudulent activity in real-time, before customer accounts and identities are compromised. iovation Inc., headquartered in Portland, OR, offers services that exposes the propensity for a transaction to be fraudulent based on the past and current behavior of a device, giving clients the power to know whom to trust.

Reputation Manager 360, the flagship product of iovation, is a fraud detection service that shares the reputation of devices across iovation’s vast global network. By sharing the reputations of more than 1.7 billion devices (such as PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones), the company allows businesses to reduce online fraud and abuse and act confidently on device intelligence with extremely low false-positives. “Our network connects all the customers that use our service into a giant community for sharing their fraud and abuse experience,” says Greg Pierson, CEO and Founder of iovation.

Unique to iovation is its approach to mitigating risk. The company does not require the exposure to personal information, but rather flags potentially bad transactions by revealing the reputation of a device, or group of related devices.

But for iovation, fighting fraud is much more than just catching the bad guys. It’s also about recognizing the good customers in order to reduce review queues, positively impacting operational efficiency in turn.

iovation’s TrustScore is built on the intelligence of more than 12 billion transactions analyzed by the company, and highlights trustworthy customers. By doing so, iovation minimizes the good transactions that get caught in review filters, meaning less manual work for analysts to review transactions.

Forrester, a technology and market research company, has reported that a significant ROI can be achieved using iovation’s technology. In fact, it documented one such case with a U.S.-based financial services issuer of private-label credit and bank cards that was experiencing high fraud rates within its internet channel. The organization was looking for a solution that could be both highly effective and efficient. Due to the labor-intensive process of online fraud reviews, reducing the number of false-positives was a necessity. According to Forrester, the company chose iovation ReputationManager 360, reached break-even on its investment in iovation technology within six months, and saved over $8Mn—achieving a risk-adjusted, two-year ROI of 321 percent. The report discovered that the organization reduced losses from fraud exposure by ‘identifying fraudulent applications early in the process and reducing the number of false positives.’

Moving ahead, iovation will be introducing new products and services that leverage its unique device intelligence consortium outside of its core ReputationManager 360 service. Pierson explains that, “There are many situations where businesses can’t reach out and touch the physical device being used by the consumer because of where they’re positioned in the transaction flow. To better support both current and new customers, we will soon provide real-time IP-address based services. We will expose the reputation of IP addresses based on the global reputation of underlying physical devices. We will also expose relationships where transactions from different IP addresses are related based on common underlying physical devices.”