Dr. Armand Sarkissian Appointed by Ethoca as Vice President of Analytics
Posted on Mon, Nov 17, 2008 @ 05:00 AM
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"Ironically, the current process costs a lot of money to protect against a small minority of actual fraudulent transactions."
- Dr. Armand Sarkissian, VP Analytics
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Respected industry expert joins collaborative fraud management leader to bolster development of leading-edge pattern recognition and predictive analysis tools global pool of experience data will yield unique information and insights to stamp out card-not-present fraud, improving the customer experience and lowering cost
Toronto (PRWEB) November 17, 2008
Ethoca, the company powering the Global Fraud Alliance, today announced the appointment of Dr. Armand Sarkissian as vice president of analytics. Dr. Sarkissian's extensive analytic background in the financial services and retail sectors, in implementing cutting-edge loss management and fraud detection systems and industry best practices, will be applied to extend Ethoca's industry-leading collaborative fraud management capabilities.
Dr. Sarkissian is leading the team of scientists and engineers who develop Ethoca's cutting-edge predictive analytics. Dr. Sarkissian brings to Ethoca skills at minimizing the financial impact of criminal activities related to application fraud, identification theft, credit card counterfeiting, online fraud, and other types of fraud.
Dr. Sarkissian's experience includes building large-scale models to identify transaction fraud, developing card-not-present and application fraud models, as well as fraud consulting and policy rules optimization. Dr. Sarkissian is an industry expert in developing and deploying transaction pattern recognition systems and analytical scoring, and has been brought on board to fully leverage the value found in Ethoca's collaborative data model. Dr. Sarkissian also brings to Ethoca broad and practical knowledge of statistical-based methods for automated business decision-making, including neural networks, logistic and linear regression, clustering, anomaly detection, and decision trees.
Previously, Dr. Sarkissian worked as a principal consultant for Greenway Solutions, where he provided strategic fraud consulting services for top retail banks and payment card issuers. Before that, he was senior director of fraud analytics at Experian, where he was responsible for all fraud-based analytical and consulting projects within Experian Americas, and served as analytics science director in Fair Isaac Corporation's Applied R&D group. At HNC Software, Dr. Sarkissian was senior staff scientist, responsible for the development and deployment of complex credit card transaction fraud models at large institutions in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
Dr. Sarkissian received his Ph.D. in physics from Northeastern University in Boston in 1994, and has held various research positions as a post-doctoral fellow at Oxford University in England and at the University of California in San Diego. Dr. Sarkissian studied engineering and physics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne in Switzerland in the 1980s.
"Dr. Sarkissian is leading our efforts to extend our existing capabilities deeper and more broadly into areas of data analysis, which will benefit the collaborative members and partners of the Global Fraud Alliance," said Keegan Johnson, Ethoca's president. "The initiatives led by Dr. Sarkissian will continue to ensure a more positive experience for retail customers around the globe as our work together reduces both direct fraud costs and the screening delays which are expensive, intrusive and create multiple additional costs for merchants and buyers."
"The idea of collaborating to fight fraud is an old concept and something many in the industry have seen as the next major evolution - as we've known for some time that the secret to major progress in the war against fraud is more and better information. But the data needed was in silos, so how could we get it?" said Dr. Sarkissian. "For the first time, a company - Ethoca - has successfully brought online merchants together to act as a community, pooling their transaction experiences into a central data repository, and it will forever change the way that we fight fraud. I am very excited to be part of such a forward-thinking and fast-progressing venture."
Fraud Facts
Nearly 98 percent of online transactions are legitimate, but most fraud management solutions focus on the fraudulent 2 percent. To keep this fraud rate low, online businesses on average refer more than 27 percent of transactions for manual review. Yet after review, more than half of all merchants accept over 90 percent of these orders and 2/3 of merchants accept more than 80 percent. Put simply: the largest online businesses overspend by enormous sums to inspect orders manually, 80 percent or more of which could be saved if they had better customer experience data to identify the good customers and give them a better purchasing experience. Ironically, the current process costs a lot of money to protect against a small minority of actual fraudulent transactions.
The primary reason for such a large percentage of manually checked orders is a lack of prior experiences with the customer. That is where Ethoca and the Global Fraud Alliance fit into the puzzle. The Global Fraud Alliance, powered by Ethoca, is the only source of positive experience information about customers who have yet to make a purchase from a particular merchant, and the only way to cut down on the 80 percent or more of manually reviewed orders that didn't require checking. Manual reviews represent by far the largest cost of managing fraud, and are often the source of processing and shipping delays that degrade the customer's experience.
The ability to quickly and automatically identify good transactions means lower direct fraud costs; fewer resources dedicated to manually reviewing orders; faster order turnaround; fewer falsely rejected good orders (meaning higher revenues) and a significantly better customer experience. Most fraud tools, if they can deal with this problem at all, attempt to sort orders based on predictive scoring algorithms or evaluating other risk factors using scant information -- in other words, they guess, rather than know -- which is the primary source of errors both in accepting bad orders and refusing good ones.
Fueled by the 20 percent annual growth rate in Internet shopping, card-not-present transactions are rapidly becoming the primary source of payment fraud.
About Ethoca
Working in partnership with forward-thinking businesses, individuals and law enforcement, Ethoca is making e-commerce safer and more profitable by building and powering the Global Fraud Alliance.
To be more successful in combating fraud, companies must collaborate across and within industries by securely sharing order experiences in a way that is not a competitive threat. Ethoca enables businesses that operate in card-not-present environments (Internet, phone, fax or mail) to make more informed decisions about their customer transactions, by sharing order experience data in a way that is secure, automated, effective and ethical. Community members see an improved customer experience, increased revenue from fewer wrongly rejected orders and reduced fraud and fraud-related costs.
Ethoca™ is a registered trademark of Ethoca Limited. For more information about Ethoca visit ethoca.com.