Prioritising fraud as a fast-growing startup

Growing a business is hard work and founders often have a million things on their plates. From growing their customer base to actually building the technology, it's hard to tackle fraud on top of it all; especially when you're encountering it for the first time. Gerry and Terry discuss how and why keeping an eye on it from the get-go is the best way to make sure it doesn't become a problem quickly.

Terry is a founder of Hailo (he has now left and works in Insuretech at IOMA). While at Hailo he was at the sharp end when the company gained serious traction around 2012 and when with that traction came some serious issues with regards to fraud.

In the episode, they discuss how the company grew so fast and what the initial indicators were that there was a problem. Not untypically the supplier network was the first to notice and swiftly the chargebacks followed as the bogus fares started to show up on people's bank accounts.

Terry has some great insight into how to stop the bleeding through manual intervention and quickly building ways to decline or stop bogus transactions. Terry also shares the importance of understanding first-hand how and why fraud is impacting your business.  But he is equally adamant that the real solution is to invest both in the people and in the systems to stem the fraud tide properly and the folly of 'pricing in' fraud in the medium to long term.

You can find the episode on both iTunes and Soundcloud.

Learn more about online payment fraud here.