Appreciate Group implements real-time fraud solution to support digital expansion

Appreciate Group is home to many of the UK’s most popular gifting and engagement products. Its gift cards, prepaid cards and vouchers include the leading multi-retailer redemption product, Love2shop. This can be spent with around 200 of the UK’s most popular brands, including Argos, M&S and John Lewis, online or in-store.

Its three lines of business are:

· Prepayment – through its Park Christmas Savings brand the organization is the leading provider in the Christmas savings market, helping over 350,000 consumers put money aside for the festive period.

· Gifting – Highstreetvouchers.com offers consumers the opportunity to purchase an array of gift cards and e-gift cards, including its multi-redemption solutions.

· Engagement – Appreciate Business Services helps around 40,000 corporate clients reward and recognise their employees and customers through loyalty schemes and employee engagement solutions.

Appreciate Group’s contract with their legacy fraud system came to an end. So they took the opportunity to look for a solution better suited to handle their growing range of digital products, including real-time e-gift cards.

Their previous fraud prevention system was slow. Orders took time to appear in the system because it was geared towards dealing with physical orders. And the fraud team couldn’t edit their rules without making a request to the provider, which had a significant lead time. Online fraud moves so quickly that the legacy solution struggled to keep up.

“It would've been simple for us to just take an off-the-shelf old replacement system, from an integration point of view. But we believe we could do things in a different and better way” - Appreciate Group’s Chris Boynton.

Appreciate Group’s priority was to find a provider and solution that would help them reinvent their fraud strategy.

They were looking for:

• Real-time machine learning decisioning to improve efficiency and accuracy

• Full ownership of the fraud detection management solution, including rule implementation

• A better user interface for increased oversight of fraud reviews and reporting

• An easy process to share data with customer services

The business successfully integrated with Ravelin under tight time constraints. Chris Boynton, Fraud Specialist at Appreciate Group, describes how teamwork helped them meet their targets:

“The collaboration between our organizations got us into a really strong position. Without Ravelin’s knowledge, experience and ability, there’s no way we would've achieved what we did in 6 months.

“And now, we see continuous improvement. We meet with Ravelin on a weekly basis, we’re constantly in communication. If we’ve got new products coming in that might increase fraud risk, I give the team a heads up. They consider the impact and we bounce ideas off each other. It’s a relationship that works really really well.”

Appreciate Group is seeing impressive results. They’ve calculated a 66% detection rate, and their accepted fraud has reduced by 32% in the last quarter, compared to the previous three.

Their false positive rate is consistently low at 2.2%. And their genuine customer decline rate is 0.7%. Their original goal was to get this percentage to <1%, and they’ve more than achieved that.

“With false positives, the lower the number, the lower the genuine customer impact, so that’s an important metric we concentrate on. And it’s stayed consistent. We’ve had a really strong performance all the way through” - Appreciate Group’s Chris Boynton.

Chris Boynton talks through the daily benefits of using Ravelin, and how they’ve successfully implemented a future-proof fraud strategy:

“I’ve been in fraud for 18 years, so I have high expectations. But Ravelin has exceeded them. The machine learning model is proving to be very accurate. When we added the fraud scoring model to our day 1 ruleset, we saw dramatic improvement. And now it’s fully embedded, we understand our fraud and can react quickly.

“It had an immediate benefit for our customer services. They could get data in seconds, and it became easier to search for customers or orders. So the customer experience has also improved.

“Importantly, we have full control. I can easily put in my own rules and create my own reports. If I put a number in front of somebody, I now know exactly where it’s from. We’ve been able to massively increase our reporting and enrich our customer data.

“The goals we set out early on - improving functionality, ownership and visibility - they’ve all been met! Talk to anybody internally here, we’re all really comfortable that we’ve got fraud under control. We have all of the best processes and procedures in place. And that’s because of the system’s capabilities and collaboration with Ravelin’s team. We’ve got a seriously robust fraud strategy and solution.”