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Risk-management firm ThreatMetrix Inc. said its ThreatMetrix ID product, announced this week, uses unique, anonymized customer data to help businesses make decisions about trust and identity.
The product, hailed as the company’s flagship, incorporates four central capabilities. One is the unique, anonymous data it has on 1.4 billion users in its Digital Identity Network, which collects and processes more than 75 million daily transactions from 40,000 Web sites and mobile apps.
The other elements are a confidence score for each potential transaction, detailed reporting that includes graphs to help visualize each digital identity, and a trust score unique to each transaction. The graphs help illustrate the various elements associated with a digital identity by displaying which are associated with a digital identity. It also offers a “relationship” view that shows how past events and behavior associated with the individual are connected.
The service works like this. By using the unique data associated with an individual and all related, known attributes—such as email addresses, shipping addresses, and payment card information—connected to that digital identity, ThreatMetrix ID provides an assessment of the person making a transaction.
“As businesses worldwide advance their digital-transformation journey, they are presented with compelling new revenue streams and customer-engagement opportunities,” said Reed Taussig, ThreatMetrix chief executive, in a press release. “But with the ever-increasing presence and sophistication of cybercrime, they must adopt new strategies to distinguish trusted customers from cybercriminals.”
Explaining further, Alisdair Faulkner, chief products officer, says in an email to Digital Transactions News, “Business need the ability to have a unified view of their transacting customers. A view that combines physical identity with digital behavior, transaction data along with the customer’s dynamic and metadata in real-time.”
He adds, “In a post-breach world, having the ability to gain this level of insights along with visualization and confidence score about the authenticity is the only way to differentiate a good customer from a fraudster, with perfect identity credentials obtained from the dark Web.”
ThreatMetrix says the service can help businesses accept more transactions, particularly cross-border ones because of the global data it uses. It also can help reduce challenge rates and make it easier to conduct manual reviews.
The need is there. Financial institutions and merchants alike have to contend with increasingly complex fraud attempts, especially as digital payments and commerce gain more ground among consumers, says a recent Aite Group LLC report on digital authentication.
