Posted by Andre Edelbrock on Thu, Mar 25, 2010
After a whirlwind few days in Las Vegas last week at the annual MRC conference, I'm back in my office catching up and thinking about all that happened. Having had a few days to reflect, I thought I would share some of my learnings from this year's conference.
To put my thoughts in perspective, this year's conference was very significant for Ethoca. We announced perhaps our biggest news ever: that we are offering a free card-not-present fraud detection service, and have begun accepting merchant applications for participation. (The application process is simply to ensure that we are protecting the integrity of Global Fraud Alliance data, and only letting legitimate online merchants in). A subset of Ethoca360 Signals (itself a newly announced service), we are offering the Negative Signals part at no charge forever as an introductory opportunity for merchants who sign up now.
Free Forever is a Big Deal
The free service is a big deal for Ethoca, because for the first time ever, it makes large scale collaboration possible in the fight against fraud by removing the most significant barrier to participation, namely price. Now the question becomes, if you can identify potential fraud by leveraging the bad payment experiences of fellow merchants, why wouldn't you?
We decided to make the Negative Signals service free forever for merchants who join now to accelerate much broader collaboration. Our thinking is that by giving away a high value production-grade service, many more merchants, payment processors and fraud solutions providers will jump in quickly, thus boosting the value to everyone, and that our upgrade service to full Ethoca360 Signals would also grow quickly and more than pay for what we give up by making Negative Signals free.
Besides, it just feels right to make this kind of collaborative information freely available as a community service. With the strong positive reaction we got from merchants, payment service providers (PSPs), card issuers, and fraud workbench/platform providers, we're confident that this is the right move at the right time.
A Highly Succcessful Conference
Having missed last year's conference due to my sister getting married in Mexico during the same week, I was pleased to accept credit (
) from Tom Donlea for boosting registrations to this year's conference by 20% by deciding to come back. OK, so maybe my return only boosted the total increase in attendance by one, but perhaps Ethoca sponsoring Governor Tom Ridge, the first US Secretary of Homeland Security as a keynote presenter last year had a carry-over effect.
Congratulations to Tom and all the MRC staff for putting on another great conference, that continues to grow and attract increased interest year-over-year from the e-commerce merchant community.
Big Trends
So what were my major observations and conclusions from this year's conference? There were two big ones in addition to getting confirmation that our free Negative Signals service was exactly the right thing to do:
- Collaboration to fight fraud is an idea whose time has come. Online merchants have never been more ready, nor the time more right than right now for working together to make the next great strides in minimizing the Total Cost of Fraud. After baby steps in data sharing, most now realize that we can't make further significant gains without large-scale collaboration to construct a 360 degree view of customer behavior and online reputation. After four years of missionary work and building out Ethoca's infrastructure to support the Global Fraud Alliance, it's gratifying to see this recognition taking hold.
- There are many widely held misconceptions about the advantages and disadvantages of data-sharing. We heard a number of shibboleths at the Data Sharing session on the last day of the conference, which made me realize that it's time to dispel the myths once and for all. One thing that we at Ethoca often forget is that just because we solved the problems doesn't mean that everyone else knows that.
To address the second issue, my next few blog posts will specifically address the numerous misconceptions about data sharing and shed some light on why large-scale global collaboration works.
It was great to see the MRC community come together again this year. Look forward to seeing you all again in 2011.