You just closed a USD 32 mln Series C Funding from Scale Venture Partners. What will the funding be used for?
Advance Forters Vision - The funds will help advance Forters vision of combating and eliminating ecommerce fraud. For retailers and merchants, this is a huge and unsolved market opportunity as USD 200 billion in good sales are blocked or declined annually and an additional USD 70 billion is lost to fraudsters.
Enable Forters Product Innovation - The funds will enable continued development of Forters award-winning global fraud prevention platform. Only Forter provides fully automated, real-time Decision as a Service antifraud, with instant approve/decline decisions backed by a 100% chargeback guarantee. We stay ahead of the fraudsters and on top of consumer trends through constant research and innovation.
Expand Forters US Expansion Efforts - The new funding will be a driving force behind Forters continued rapid growth and overall expansion throughout the US. Helping completely remove the fear of fraud from ecommerce will enable retailers to capture more sales.
What are the problems that you see in this industry right now?
Right now, fraud prevention is treated as cost containment. We think that is a problem. Fraud prevention ought to be in line with wider company goals - enabling sales and a great customer experience.
The industry norm is fraud prevention is causing a lot of friction at checkout and beyond, and outmoded rules based solutions that cannot scale effectively and are expensive. The market is ripe for a SAAS company to disrupt and allow merchants to participate in an automated network effect to combat online fraud.
What is the problem that you came to solve?
Full automation of fraud decisions is fantastic at stopping fraud and at adapting to new fraudster techniques and consumer buying patterns - something that is important when you realise that global annual fraud losses reach USD 70 billion.
Its also much better for customers, getting rid of the delays in order confirmation and fulfillment, as well as mistaken rejection of orders, that can make shopping online frustrating. With USD 200 billion of lost sales up for grabs annually, its worth retailers while to streamline and smooth the shopping process as much as possible.
How does your technology work?
Machine learning, sophisticated algorithms, a huge amount of data, behavioral analysis, cyber intelligence and elastic identity - all leveraged and combined in just the right ways through the human expertise, experience and insight of our researchers, both analytical and technical.
The idea behind it is that we do not look at individual transactions - that was the manual review approach. We look at trends, patterns and people. For example, we know what a traveling student buyer looks like - we know how they behave, how they order, what to look for. So if theres a fraudster pretending to be one, we will know, because its so difficult to get every single detail right when youre pretending. You would need to ace it on more than 7000 data points and all the complex interlacing connections between those points.
How do your solutions integrate into your clients platforms?
There are two main components - a JavaScript snippet, which just has to be cut and pasted into the website, and API integration, which is tailored to fit the clients platform. In general, the actual integration takes a matter of a few weeks, and then we exhaustively test during a dry run phase to make sure everything is working as it should.
We also have a plugin to make integration easy. For example, we offer a Magento extension or Demandware cartridge so retailers using those platforms can use those, making integration even faster.
How have you innovated with your service?
The whole service is innovative - the full automation of fraud prevention, with the genuinely real-time decisions that comes with that, is new, and it is only possible due to highly innovative technology.
The impact it has on retailers (increased sales, removing risk, more satisfied customers, more reliable fulfillment timeline) is innovative, and so is the impact it has on customers (frictionless checkout experience, no need to provide further identifying information, no delays or confusion in receiving confirmation of the order, no delays in fulfillment caused by fraud prevention).
Forters approach is innovative in itself. We aim to transform online fraud prevention as a whole - moving from risk prevention and limitation to becoming an integrated part of the company, and a contributor to company goals of growth and customer satisfaction.
Forter has been awarded Gold for Best Fraud Prevention in the Florin Awards at the European Payments Summit, a Transactives conference on the continuous personal professional development in payments. You can meet the EPS organizers at their upcoming event, Global Payment Summit, 12-13 October in Singapore, a leading forum where key thought leaders, experts and practitioners in the payment and transaction arena meet and discuss the innovation agenda.
About Bill Zielke
Bill is an experienced ecommerce executive. Before joining Forter, Bill was a Senior Director and Head of eBay Motors. Prior to that, he helped bring numerous new products to market, notably in his roles as Head of PayPal NA Merchant Marketing , VP Merchant Marketing at Bill Me Later and VP Product at CheckFree. In the earlier days of his career, Bill served as a Senior Risk Advisor at JP Morgan Chase. Bill holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Transylvania University.
About Forter
Forter provides new generation fraud prevention to meet the challenges faced by modern enterprise ecommerce. Only Forter provides fully automated, real-time Decision as a Service fraud prevention, backed by a 100% fraud chargeback guarantee - instant, guaranteed approve/decline decisions for every transaction. The system eliminates the need for rules, scores or manual reviews, making fraud prevention friction-free. Behind the scenes, Forters machine learning technology combines advanced cyber intelligence with behavioral and identity analysis to create a multi-layered fraud detection mechanism. The result is best for online merchants, and best for online customers.
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