Heroes in Business - Experian Identity Report with David Britton Vice President of Strategy, Global Identity and Fraud for Experian

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

Experian Identity Report with David Britton Vice President of Strategy, Global Identity and Fraud for Experian interviewed by David Cogan Host of the Heroes Show. They discuss how to Stop Fraud Before it Begins. www.Experian.com

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating, it's energizing, it's Eliance's Heroes. Eliance's is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities and startups, where our heroes in business align. Now here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Alliances. That's right. That's my preferred mode of transportation, flying in. Make sure that you go to Alliances.com, that's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com, and click on radio, where you can also see and view past interviews. I'm very excited today because we have with us, we're doing the Experian Identity Report today. And as you know, these special reports include interviews with the world's

leading experts about the game-changing impact of identity and the need to use reliable data to make confident decisions that safely accelerate the customer engagement. So without further ado, please welcome back David Britton back to the show. He is the Vice President of Strategy for Experience, Identity, and Fraud Business. And this is a great topic again. This is about stopping fraud before it happens. And remember, you can learn more by going to Experian.com, E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N.com. So, David, tell us why this is so important for businesses. Well, thanks, first of all, David, for having me back.

It's great to always have the discussion with you and appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts. Stopping fraud before it happens is absolutely critical for business. And we think about it in a couple of different ways. The first one is around cost. You know, fraud costs businesses money. Clearly, if it's theft of product, if it's theft of service, you lose the money related to that goods or that service. But many businesses may not be aware that there are a number of other costs that they may incur as a result of that. number of other costs that they may incur as a result of that, downstream costs, things like the cost of operations to manage the responses that come through. In the case of e-commerce

and retail, these are chargeback management fees and costs. So there's a whole element of cost. The numbers that we've seen show that for every dollar that is lost to fraud, there's probably $3 in total costs around managing the risk, the result of that fraud. So cost is a big one. The other one on cost is actually around cost of acquisition of the customer. You spend a lot of money to bring customers to your business, make sure you're bringing the right customers to the business. Otherwise you undo if you're turning good customers away at the front door, it's sort of the counterpoint to the fraud losses. Are you're turning good customers away at the front door. It's sort of the counterpoint to the fraud loss is, are you upsetting your good customers even before they have a chance to

establish a relationship? The second area that's kind of critical is around credibility and reputation. So if you're a business that's suddenly under significant attack from fraudsters, you run the risk of losing credibility with your vendors that you work with, with the service providers, the people that are processing payments on your behalf. They take a look at this. And if your numbers from a fraud perspective go up, they have more concern about the engagement they have with you as a business. So there's a credibility factor there. The other credibility factor is actually in the fraudster community itself, where the fraudsters, once they realize they may have found a business that's an easy target, they'll share that

information in the underground and they'll share that you're a weak target. And so you'll suddenly see an increase of other attackers coming to you. And so those are some of the biggest areas. And then the last one I would say is, is when it comes to fighting fraud and being able to detect it early, we found that the same information you might use to defend yourself against fraud early in the process can be very useful to ensuring that your best and good customers, your legitimate customers have a seamless engagement, a really trusted relationship with you over time. So it's, you get both benefits. If you can stop it up front, you also get the benefit of knowing who your great customers are. Excellent. This is

great information. Now, can Experian help organizations come up with a plan? Absolutely. Yeah, we've got a whole team of experts across a number of vertical industries. So whether you're in the financial services space, whether you're in the fintech space, in the e-retail space, e-commerce, travel, we have a whole slew of experts that are available to be able to talk through what's your desired outcomes? What is your strategy you currently have in place? How do you want to modify that? What are your growth plans as a business? are you hoping to expand into new geographies or new product offerings is there a risk that's inherent in those and so we have a team that can certainly help walk you through those things as as you think about the portfolio

that you're trying to protect the portfolio of services you have to offer you want to protect and then how we might be able to layer the right solutions together for you excellent and again you're watching and listening to me, David Kogan, host of the Alliances Hero Show. Make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com. Click on radio so that you can also see past episodes, including ones with David Britton and Experian. Make sure that you go to Experian.com. That's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N.com. So David, what Experian products

though can help companies stop fraud early though in the process? Yeah, it's a fantastic question because the truth is that there are a number of capabilities. There are a number of offerings and solutions that are applicable to solving the problem upfront. And as we think about it, there's two ways to think about it. One, there are discrete capabilities, things like identity verification, identity authentication. So not just is David Britton's information correct at his address, but is it actually David that's presenting that data? So having tools that can be useful to help identify those things, whether it's for identity authentication, identity verification, looking at the digital signatures that are coming in, which devices are they using, how are they

behaving when they use that device, meaning how do they click through a website or a mobile app? All of these are the types of tools that are very powerful, but only when you pull them together in a meaningful way. So we have some of these fundamental sort of core capabilities, and then bringing them together, we have a solution set that we call our cross-core platform that allows us to take advantage of all of these very powerful individual solutions and bring them together into a more meaningful, single decision-making environment so that the business can immediately know in real time if they should trust this interaction, if they recognize this user coming back, and then thereby

reduce the risk that may be associated with it under normal circumstances. This is fantastic information and very useful because many of our listeners own businesses or obviously work in businesses and that, and I'm sure probably have experienced some type of fraud. So what else, though, would you like to share with our audience about this critical topic? Yeah, a couple of things. I think, you know, especially when you're dealing with sort of smaller businesses or businesses where there's a higher, perhaps lower volume of traffic, a single fraudulent impact or a single fraud attack can be really devastating. What I've found is that some of the old adages remain true here. So if something sounds too good to be true,

a big order comes in, it's a little unusual for your business, do the extra homework and really dig in to see, is that business a legitimate business? If it's sort of a business to business relationship or transaction, is the person who they claim to be, do a little bit of sleuthing and use services that are available for that kind of verification in advance of actually executing the transaction so if something's too good to be true it likely is even though it may seem really appealing and maybe right in the corner of your business that's that's the biggest one to do the other one is to remember the internet was not designed with security in mind right the digital environment is by its by its nature an anonymous environment. So how do we replicate understanding who the person is on the other end? Can we trust them? There are the tools we're

bringing together to be able to do that and take advantage of those and just remember that as well. And then the last one I would say is remember that fraud prevention doesn't have to equal sales prevention. A lot of times these things are seen in conflict with each other. Our belief and the evidence plays this out. If you can do a great job of understanding what to look for to detect fraud, that same data, those same signals, the same information can be incredibly powerful for ensuring even better sales over time, stronger customer relationships with better upsell opportunities, and so on. So those are kind of the things we would want people to take away. Excellent. Well, definitely. I mean, this is so important

information. And make sure that you go to alliances.com. Again, click on radio, near past episodes, which include Experian along with David Britton. Make sure, again, you click on that. And this has been the Experian Identity Report with David Britton, Vice President of Strategy for Global Identity and Fraud at Experian. A lot going on and they're here to help. So make sure you go to Experian.com. Again, that's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliances.

Thank you.