Can merchants work together to fight fraud?

We're very excited to have welcomed Gill to the podcast this week to talk about how and if merchants can work together to combat fraud.

Gill starts out by saying, "you don't know what you don't know," when it comes to fraud prevention. It's only by speaking with other merchants or people who have had similar experiences with fraud that you learn how to better protect your business. This is especially true as a new company, when it's important to understand why they're seeing chargebacks and how fraud is happening.

While sharing data seems like a great idea, Gerry asks Gill if many merchants would actually be open to it? Gill reckons that fraud professionals get a lot more value in actually discussing challenges, tactics, etc with their peers than listening to a speaker at a conference. Getting in a room and speaking with peers about common fraud challenges is the best way to get actionable tips for how to better fight fraud.

Sharing advice is different from sharing data however, Gerry points out, but would there be value in sharing data between merchants? While there are big data privacy implications and legal teams would need to be brought in to ensure no business' data would be compromised, it is not an unobtainable concept. Also, being able to share confirmed fraud through data such as TC40s or compromised card numbers, would be invaluable for merchants.

Gill stressed that the integrity of the data being shared would need to be high. As long as all businesses were sharing data with the same parameters pertaining to chargebacks and confirmed fraud, it would be a really useful for merchants across industries. The more information merchants have at their fingertips, the better decisions they can make around fraud prevention. If legal and technical issues are guaranteed to not be a problem, then sharing this data would be a no-brainer.

One of the best places for merchants to swap war stories and learn from one another, is the Merchant Risk Council (MRC). The MRC caters to fraud professional from across experience levels and industries. The MRC creates safe spaces for collaboration between merchants throughout the year with their conferences, members' meetings and roundtable events.

Learn more about online payment fraud here.