Fraud is a huge problem across the payments industry. Merchant losses from fraud hit $38 billion in 2023 and are set to hit $91 billion by 2028. But, with attacks growing more complex, sophisticated and organized each year, very few merchants can stop bad actors on their own.
To help you keep your merchants (and their customers) secure, we have seamlessly integrated advanced fraud protection powered by Kount 360 by Equifax into our modular payments platform. With Kount 360 by Equifax, you can offer your merchants turnkey access to the industry’s most advanced, AI-powered fraud prevention tools and make minimizing losses simple and easy. into our modular payments platform. With Kount, you can offer your merchants turnkey access to the industry’s most advanced, AI-powered fraud prevention tools and make minimizing losses simple and easy.
Payments Fraud Is Getting Costlier and More Sophisticated
As payments and commerce continue to digitize and the landscape becomes more complex, opportunities for fraudsters are growing. According to research from the Association for Financial Professionals, 80% of businesses are targeted by some type of payments fraud, and almost 40% recover less than 10% of the total funds lost. At the same time, fraud-as-a-service and new AI-powered tools are available on the dark web, making it easier than ever for bad actors to launch sophisticated attacks.
To combat the growing threat, your merchants need better fraud protection systems. Protecting your merchants from increasingly sophisticated attacks is quickly becoming one of the most valuable services a provider can offer. While some fraud, like refund abuse, can’t be stopped at the source, other types, like stolen cards, identity theft and serial charge-back abuse can. That’s where Kount comes in.
Protecting Your Merchants From Fraud With Kount 360
Kount 360 is an advanced, AI-powered fraud prevention tool you can resell to your merchants as one of NMI’s value-added extensions. At the heart of the integration is Kount 360’s ability to automatically and invisibly scan every transaction in the blink of an eye, rooting out and zapping fraud, reducing false positives and saving your merchants money and headaches.
To do that, the system goes through five basic steps every time one of your Kount 360-protected merchants receives an order.
Step 1: Once a payment is made, the transaction data is passed securely to Equifax.
Step 2: Kount 360’s unique AI-powered screening system performs real-time analysis of the transaction data and compares it against a proprietary global database of over 30 billion transactions.
Step 3: The scan results are used to generate a Kount Omniscore — a safety rating that accurately assesses how risky a transaction is based on 200+ variables.
Step 4: The scored transaction is passed through a set of checks with customizable thresholds that merchants can adjust to determine which transactions are approved, which are declined and which are quarantined for further review.
Step 5: The data and final outcome are used to make Kount’s model better, ensuring each transaction and each stopped attack help make the next scan even more accurate and secure.
That might sound like a complex and confusing process, but it happens entirely in the background and finishes in just 250 milliseconds, ensuring Kount protects your merchant’s transactions without negatively impacting their speed or the quality of customer experience.
What Are the Benefits of Kount 360 Fraud Tools?
There are a lot of anti-fraud tools on the market, and merchants have no shortage of choice. So what makes Kount 360 special? The following are just some of the key reasons Kount 360 by Equifax stands out and pushes payments fraud protection to the next level.
Kount 360 is Powerful
Kount uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to screen transactions more thoroughly, catch more fraud and minimize false positives. But Kount isn’t just any AI-powered tool; its unique two-pronged approach uses both supervised and unsupervised ML to create the most complete turnkey solution available today.
Supervised ML uses the tens of billions of transaction and customer data points Kount 360 has access to from 16+ years as a leader in fraud screening and from partnerships with other industry leaders like Equifax.
Unsupervised ML takes it to the next level, enabling the AI to analyze brand-new, never-before-seen transaction data from outside the global database. That allows you to analyze each new transaction your merchants process more deeply in real-time. The data can also be used to help Kount 360 learn. Both are major advantages over other AI screening tools.
With the two streams combined, it can offer the most accurate real-time transaction screening and risk scoring in the industry, generating results you can trust and automation you can depend on.
Kount 360 Is Easy
Merchants want great fraud protection, but 66% struggle to dedicate enough internal resources to fraud management, and 54% have a hard time leveraging tools. That’s why we’ve made our Kount 360 integration so easy to resell, integrate and use.
To get started, Kount 360 just needs to be toggled on in the merchant portal, so there’s no additional onboarding or friction. From that point on, the merchant’s transactions will be protected by the industry’s most sophisticated fraud detection tool.
Its seamless integration into the merchant dashboard makes it easy for merchants to set their custom risk screening rules, review flagged or automatically canceled transactions and see all of Kount 360’s previous decisions and risk scores.
Kount 360 Is Flexible
Kount 360 provides maximum flexibility, enabling your merchants to ensure their fraud protection is fine-tuned to match their risk appetites, their business needs and the unique profiles of their verticals and customers.
Your merchants can easily customize the thresholds that it uses to determine whether a transaction should be approved or declined, including the Kount Omniscore, transaction amounts, locations, device information and more.
Merchants can also flexibly choose how much automation they want, whether they’re putting decision-making entirely in Kount 360’s hand or using it as a supplement for traditional manual reviews.
Kount 360 Is Proactive
Kount 360 stands out as the most proactive fraud management solution on the market because of its blend of supervised and unsupervised machine learning paired with easy-to-understand reporting.
Thanks to its unsupervised ML, Kount 360 can react and adapt to new and evolving threats far better than systems that can only make decisions based on old data. That helps keep your merchants’ defenses one step ahead of the bad guys.
Kount 360’s reporting tools enable merchants to quickly gain a clear picture of what their fraud exposure looks like and how the system is responding. That allows them to refine their fraud screening rules as the industry (and attackers) evolves.
Kount 360 Is Profitable
Kount 360 is a value-added service that enables you to protect your merchants and open a new source of monthly recurring revenue at the same time. And, with 60% of merchants planning to spend more on anti-fraud tools in the near future, there has never been a better time to offer your merchants the most effective automatic screening solution available.
It also boosts your merchants’ bottom line since protecting merchants from payments fraud also protects them from the inevitable losses that occur when funds are clawed back. Kount 360 also minimizes false positives, helping merchants recapture revenue that would’ve been lost when frustrated customers turn elsewhere.
Finally, by letting merchants rely on automated decision-making more often, Kount 360 frees up the time and financial resources merchants have traditionally had to put into manual reviews. In short, it’s a financial win-win for both you and your customers.
It has the power to significantly improve your merchants’ fraud management abilities and to get started, all you have to do is turn it on. To find out more about everything Kount 360 can do for your customers or how to set up a free trial, reach out to a member of our team.
