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Independent sales organizations, merchant acquirers, and payment facilitators catering to small-business owners who have e-commerce sites now can sell them a MasterCard Inc. service to help mitigate the risk associated with card-not-present transactions.
MasterCard introduced Simplify Controls Monday, a service that includes an online dashboard and app that enables merchants to review and approve or decline a prospective transaction. The service is as much about ensuring legitimate transactions are approved as it is about stopping fraudulent ones, says Deborah Barta, global lead of Simplify Commerce, a companion payments platform that is part of MasterCard.
It works like this. The merchant receives an alert—which can appear in the online dashboard, in the app, or on an Apple Watch—about a suspect transaction. Within the app or online, he can take action to approve or decline the transaction. The merchant can set a series of rules based on their risk tolerance, Barta says. The alerts arrive as the transactions occur prior to pre-authorization, potentially saving the merchant pre-authorization fees, she says.
The Simplify Controls app is available for Android and iOS mobile devices. The wearable app currently is only for Apple devices, but an Android version is in development, Barta says.
“We developed this as a natural extension of our platform,” Barta tells Digital Transactions News. “We made it a module so it can be sold completely independent of Simplify Commerce.” Simplify Commerce works across multiple channels, including e-commerce, mobile, social buy buttons, and in-app payments.
Simplify Controls also incorporates a fraud score supplied by Kount Inc., and is available as a software development kit and through application programming interfaces for integration into software.
Card-not-present transaction management is just as important to smaller merchants as it is to larger ones, Barta says. A recent MasterCard survey of approximately 3,000 small and mid-size businesses found that 86% were concerned about data security for their businesses, and 89% were concerned about keeping their consumers’ information private. But 60% of all respondents said they used no fraud-prevention tools.
Additionally, these merchants have to contend with increasing online-fraud attempts stemming from the EMV chip card migration for card-present transactions. As criminals find it tougher to commit card fraud at the point of sale, they’re turning to online commerce.
Helping small and mid-size businesses counter surging online fraud attempts is vital, says Michael Moeser, director of payments at Javelin Strategy and Research, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based research firm.
“First, as EMV continues to roll out in the marketplace, fraudsters are quickly moving away from committing in-store fraud to online, card-not-present fraud,” Moeser says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “Being able to sniff out this type of fraud is critical since it allows the small merchant to focus on the ‘real’ customers. Second, as commerce moves more to digital channels and away from in-store, physical channels, having a useful tool that helps merchants with the growing part of their business will help them become more successful.”
Tools like MasterCard’s help small merchants, who are largely on their own in the fight against payment crime, Moeser says. “Having a tool that helps small-business owners separate real digital customers from fraudsters puts the owner back in the driver seat when it comes to growing their business.”
