Can merchants work together to fight fraud?

We're very excited to welcome to the podcast Gill Wells, Co-Chair of the European Advisory Board for the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) and Revenue Assurance Manager at Just Eat to talk about how and if merchants can work together to combat fraud.

"You don't know what you don't know" when it comes to fraud, Gill says.

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 for new companies, when it's important to understand why they're seeing chargebacks and how fraud is happening.

While sharing data seems like a great idea, how open to this are merchants? 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 conversing 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 – which is where the discussion goes next.

Gill stresses that the integrity of the data being shared would need to be high. As long as all businesses are 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, creating safe spaces for collaboration between merchants throughout the year with their conferences, members' meetings and roundtable events.