Building on fraud prevention technology initially developed at online travel company Orbitz, a group of ex-Orbitz executives has founded Accertify LLC. The company is launching the web-enabled Interceptas as an online payments risk management application.
Interceptas is designed to be both comprehensive in managing multiple components of risk in payment transactions as well as more streamlined than conventional applications, says Mike Long, vice president and chief marketing officer. A former forensic accounting expert with accounting and auditing firm KPMG, Long went to work for Orbitz in 2000 to help develop a credit card fraud prevention system. The new system helped enable Orbitz to halve its 20-person risk management team, while increasing by about sixfold the number of payment transactions reviewed, says Long, who is a former member of the board of the Merchant Risk Council, a retail e-commerce industry risk management organization.
The Interceptas application represents the third generation of the original Orbitz application developed in 2001, Long says, adding that Accertify now has no direct ties with the online travel company. Accertify hasn`t yet announced any clients but expects to have Interceptas implemented at several retail clients within the next few months, Long adds.
Interceptas is designed to streamline information on payment transactions, pulling information from multiple databases-including consumer addresses, past purchase history, chargeback records, card verification numbers, and account number verification records-and presenting them on two or three data windows on a computer screen instead of the more common seven or eight windows in other systems, Long says. You can review more orders with our ability to slice and dice data without going back and forth to multiple databases or toggling between seven or eight data screens, Long says. The system also pulls information from outside partners, including credit card verification firm Experian.
Users of Interceptas can set business rules to automatically accept, reject or transfer to manual review transactions based on the available information on each transaction. If a transaction’s billing address doesn’t match its shipping address, it might be forwarded to a manual review, for example; or if a credit card account number is associated with a large number of past chargebacks, a transaction might get rejected.
The system is also designed with link analysis for investigating other orders that could also be associated with transactions identified as fraudulent. A phone number associated with a transaction identified as fraudulent, for instance, could be scanned against a database to check if it’s associated with other pending orders. It’s amazing how many orders come back with the same phone number, Long says.
Interceptas also enables users to check records of chargebacks-or orders charged back to a merchant after a consumer rejects them because of fraud or other reasons-against records of how the pertinent transaction was handled by risk management agents. This allows fraud management agents to pull the original order to see how business rules were set, and what happened during a manual review process, such as whether an agent called the cardholder, Long says.
Accertify currently offers Interceptas as a licensed or hosted application. Users of the hosted application can share in a cooperative database of payment transaction data. Accertify is also planning to offer a similar database service for users of its licensed software, Long says. Early next year, the company also expects to offer a managed service for clients that want to outsource their payment transaction risk management, he adds.
In March of this year, Long and other former Orbitz executives-Jeffrey Lisendahl and Gary Doernhoefer, currently CEO and general counsel, respectively, of Accertify-founded Accertify along with two principals of software company PSC Group which helped develop the Orbitz fraud management application. The PSC principals, Andrew Lauter and Bruce Bellak, now also serve as chief technology officer and chief information officer, respectively, of Accertify. The start-up company has been funded solely by management but is also considering outside funding, Long says.