Kount’s best-in-class fraud prevention solutions protect the digital innovations of over 6,500 brands globally. We have earned recognition as the market leader in digital fraud prevention, with over 12 years of data informing our advanced ML/AI models. This patented technology prevents digital payments fraud, new account fraud, and account takeovers to increase revenue for digital businesses, acquiring banks, and payment service providers.
Secur is a Kount Platinium partner based in South Africa, offering Kount implementation, integration and support services, these services can be offered even in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Kenya and Nigeria
The Kount Difference
Kount’s award-winning payments fraud prevention solution protects digital commerce in hyper-competitive, high-risk environments, while enabling businesses to deliver a frictionless experience to legitimate customers. Kount does not over rely on any particular aspect of fraud prevention.
Identity Trust Global Network
With comprehensive transaction and identity data, Kount enables real-time decisioning on the level of trust appropriate for the level of risk presented.
This data crosses different transaction complexities, different verticals, and different geographies so machine learning models can be properly trained to accurately predict risk. That analytical richness includes data on physical real-world and digital identities creating an integrated picture of customer behavior.
This provides merchants—regardless of industry, customer base, or geography—insights to protect against fraudulent activities.
Advanced Machine Learning
Kount employs unsupervised as well as supervised machine learning models. These models lead the market in predictive ability because they are infused with 12 years of deep domain expertise and are trained on data from Kount’s vast Identity Trust Global Network.
To get the most out of machine learning, one has to know how to define the problems to be solved. This is where Kount’s fraud expertise comes into play, as a team of data scientists determine the most meaningful machine learning features for even the most sophisticated types of attacks and use those features to identify behavioral anomalies as well as common good behavior for a given identity or identity attribute.
Control Center
Kount’s Control Center provides the ability to fine-tune fraud prevention decisions, conduct investigations, and monitor performance.
It enables customers to create rules and policies that meet their unique business needs (from promotions and policy abuse to non-fraud chargebacks) and customize their risk thresholds to address emerging attack methods, new use cases, and issues such as bad marketing affiliates and SKU-specific policies.
Critical tools are also available for investigation, rescoring, and reporting.
Datamart
Self-service analytics allows for in-depth investigation into suspicious behavior as well as business performance. That learning can inform future rules and policies created within the Kount solution, but it can also provide a breadth and depth of customer knowledge.
That knowledge can lead to improved marketing activities, the introduction of new use cases, or the expansion of sales channels. The analysis possible with Datamart goes far beyond preventing fraud behaviors to providing insights into business performance.
The Combination Is Everything
The cumulative effect of all elements makes Kount the leader in payments fraud prevention, new account fraud prevention, and account takeover protection. Kount enables over 6,500 leading brands to confidently innovate (via new digital channels and geographic markets) while precisely controlling their fraud strategy.
 Payments Fraud PreventionLearn how Kount prevents digital payment transaction fraud. |
 New Account Fraud PreventionLearn how Kount prevents new account creation fraud. |
 Account Takeover ProtectionLearn how Kount protects against account takeovers. |
The Pitfalls Of A Non-Balanced Approach
Machine Learning Alone
Heavy Rule And Manual Review Approaches
How It Works
Kount Control – Account Takeover Protection
Kount Control combines three key layers to deliver adaptive protection against the latest account takeover attacks, policy customization to fine-tune protection, and reporting / data presentation to uncover trends. It reduces false positives, enables customized user experiences, and reveals trends that enrich custom data to inform future policies.
Protection That Adapts
The protection layer of Kount Control evaluates user behavior, device and network anomalies to detect high-risk activity such as bots, credential stuffing and brute force attacks. Kount then determines in real time whether a login should be allowed, declined, or challenged with step-up authentication.
Kount’s device and account intelligence analyzes trust and risk signals along with account behaviors to deliver the appropriate response. Linking detailed data such as trusted device status, IP addresses, mobile and proxy indicators, and more, Kount enables the execution of risk and trust-based user authentication policies. It creates a welcoming experience for known customers and protects against fraudulent account access.
Adaptive Friction
In the policy and customization layer, Kount Control provides the capability to customize user experiences and reduce friction by identifying and segmenting users based on common characteristics, such as VIP or trial users. Unlike other solutions, Kount Control provides a rich set of essential data for delivering adaptive friction with the necessary precision. This dataset includes user type, device specifics, IP risk, geolocation, custom data, and more.
Some users are higher risk, some users are no-risk, and some users might require a personalized experience. Creating policies based on rich data from Kount’s Identity Trust Global Network, businesses can decide what type of experience to deliver to their customer, from low friction to step-up authentication.
Reporting and Data Presentation
The reporting and data layer of Kount Control provides multi-dimensional data and real-time reporting, revealing valuable customer insights that can be used to fine-tune business policies and provide customized experiences. Login trend data, including device and IP information, is rarely available to fraud teams. With the ability to quickly identify and report on failed login attempts, risky IPs, compromised accounts, and inbound anomalies, businesses can stop account takeover attempts, and uncover trends that enrich their own data and inform future policies.
Kount’s solution also provides rich data about each login event, including device information, the trust status of the device, and geolocation to more accurately identify a returning customer so that the right level of friction can be applied at the time of login.
Identity Trust Global Network
Kount Control is the only ATO solution built on the Identity Trust Global Network, linking risk and trust signals from location data, digital identifier data, and unique customer data to enable accurate account protection in real time. Linked by AI, the Identity Trust Global Network combines signals from 32 billion annual interactions, and across 75+ industries and 250+ countries and territories, to block fraud in real time and to enable personalized customer experiences.
Friendly Fraud Challenges
Tackling fraud can be difficult because it’s hard to identify and distinguish between criminal fraud, friendly fraud, and legitimate disputes.
Reducing criminal fraud is a necessary first step in order to isolate and address friendly fraud, since they are often classified under the same reason codes. Friendly fraud requires a specialized set of tools that are typically not included in traditional fraud detection solutions. The ability to quickly and accurately identify and segment fraud can help mitigate challenges, improve operations, and increase revenue.
Types of Chargebacks
Criminal Fraud: Fraud from stolen credit card numbers or other types of financially malicious activity that result in chargebacks.
Friendly Fraud: A legitimate purchase made by a consumer with their credit card is disputed with the issuing bank rather than requesting exchanges or refunds from the merchant. It can be malicious, but more often, there may be a misunderstanding.
Legitimate Disputes: Authentic customer disputes, for example when a product arrived damaged, late, or was misrepresented in sales materials.
Learn more about friendly fraud and how Kount can prevent it.
Types of Friendly Fraud
- Accidental friendly fraud: A consumer made a purchase but doesn’t recognize it due to limited information on a bank statement.
- Intentional friendly fraud: A consumer made a purchase and recognizes the purchase, but still requests a credit from the issuing bank, claiming they did not make the purchase.
- Merchant error: A merchant doesn’t provide adequate support to avoid a chargeback. This can include limited merchant descriptors on a bank statement, poor customer service, etc.
- Shared card fraud: Many consumers share a card with family members. As a result, if one person uses the card and doesn’t inform the other, this can lead to friendly fraud.
- Policy abuse fraud: Allows users to return items within a certain time limit without needing to provide a reason. It does not typically limit the number of times you can return or request a refund. However, many companies take action if they feel a shopper is abusing the policy.
- In-flight refund : When a business issues a refund, the time it takes to process could be several days to several weeks, however consumers expect the refund to be instantaneous. When the refund isn’t quick enough, the customer often calls the bank and it can be refunded twice.
Impacts of Friendly Fraud
The total cost of friendly fraud can be far more than just the cost of the lost goods. Businesses can receive chargebacks and penalties, could be placed in chargeback monitoring programs, or even face double refunds and chargebacks.
Chargebacks and fees
Automatic chargebacks and penalties can occur with a dispute
Cost of lost goods
Businesses could lose out on the cost of goods if the consumer says the goods were never received
Double refunds
If a refund isn’t processed quickly enough and it is refunded twice, the business loses twice the cost of the goods and receives a double chargeback
Increase in chargeback ratio
Placement in Visa’s chargeback monitoring program could occur if transactions with chargebacks exceed 0.9%
Kount Friendly Fraud Prevention Solution
Kount’s Friendly Fraud Prevention Solution featuring VMPI protects against chargebacks, increases revenue, and improves customer experience. Datamart, Kount’s advanced data analytics, analyzes fraud and then isolates the legitimate disputes from friendly fraud.
Identify Criminal Fraud with Kount’s AI
Using supervised and unsupervised machine learning, Kount distills transaction risk into a single safety rating, Omniscore, which detects more fraud and minimizes false positives.
Deflect Friendly Fraud Chargebacks with VMPI
Reduce unnecessary payment disputes by allowing issuing banks to request information from businesses to help cardholders recognize a transaction at the time of inquiry, and on average, deliver 5x the return on investment.
Access Datamart Advanced Data Analytics
Analyze fraud by looking at a rich data set including qualifiers such as email address, product, and data types, then isolate the legitimate disputes from friendly fraud.
Simplify Alerts and Representment Services
Fraud alerts and chargeback retrieval and representment services are available through Kount partners to help businesses gain more information about a dispute quicker.
Improve Operations
After tackling criminal and friendly fraud, look beyond chargebacks and pinpoint how to improve customer experience, margins, and revenue.
Kount Integration to VMPI
Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry
The Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry (VMPI) program helps issuers and businesses reduce unnecessary payment disputes. The program allows issuing banks to request information from businesses to help cardholders recognize a transaction at the time of inquiry. This decreases the number of chargebacks issued, the cost of chargebacks, and improves the quality of chargeback data used to optimize a businesses’ fraud strategy.
Kount integration to VMPI
Kount’s integration to VMPI allows businesses to participate in the VMPI program through Kount, eliminating the need for a direct integration and ongoing technical maintenance. Once set up, Kount will receive VMPI inquiries for participating businesses and respond with customer and transaction details. Customers can be reminded in real time about their purchases, deflecting chargeback losses and fees, and on average, deliver 5x the return on investment.