MasterCard Anti-Fraud Tool

Coming soon to a merchant near you—MasterCard is launching a cloud based, fraud prevention tool specifically for small and medium sized businesses to use in their e-commerce transactions. As the following article describes, merchants can set risk-based buyer attributes that are then used to automatically approve or deny online transactions.

MasterCard has an e-commerce anti-fraud tool for small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses. Called Simplify Controls, it lets SMEs control, prevent and monitor e-commerce transactions in real time.

MasterCard will sell the anti-fraud tool to acquirers who can then make it available to their customers. Running in the cloud, Simplify Controls helps businesses easily identify and prevent fraudulent activity based on their risk tolerance. It supports all card types, not just MasterCard.

Simplify Controls then automatically declines transactions to meet their risk tolerance and provides merchants with smart alerts so they can stay on top of potentially fraudulent activity. The MasterCard fraud protection integrate fraud scoring from Kount whose decisioning engine analyzes hundreds of variables and activity across the globe in real-time.

The software delivers statistics that merchants can read at a glance to see their overall exposure and potential fraud risks and enabled direct control over the transactions they submit for authorization. It is launching first in the U.S. but will eventually be available globally.

The anti-fraud tool box continues to grow with MasterCard giving merchants control over the approval process for their e-commerce transactions. While several security software firms offer existing solutions for online fraud protection, the new offering appears to be a more cost-effective option especially for smaller merchants. Notably, this MasterCard tool will support other credit cards as well. The software will not be sold directly to merchants, but instead rely on acquirers to provide to their customers. So this may take a while to determine the effectiveness of this new software.

Overview by Raymond Pucci, Associate Director, Research Services at Mercator Advisory Group

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