Q: How can my organization benefit from a partnership with Ethoca?

1. Tap into a rapidly growing global network of online merchants representing over 500M transaction experiences means higher accuracy of fraud screening and fewer false positives for your merchant clients.
2. Take advantage of secure centralized data pooling across PSPs, issuers, fraud and identity solution providers and industries because fraud is agnostic
3. Offer your clients access to a premier global anti-fraud service

Q: What kinds of companies partner with Ethoca?

Some of the biggest names in payment processing, fraud prevention have joined forces with Ethoca. They include leading payment service providers like RBS and leading fraud solution providers like 41st Parameter.

Another type of partner is GB Group, one of the UK’s leading Identity Management companies. And IMRG, the UK’s e-retail member community, has chosen to offer accredited retailers Negative Signals service as part of their ISIS (Internet Shopping is Safe) program.

Q: How do I get a Signal?

There are two basic ways:

• Quick Start option: Ethoca subscribes to your Application Programming Interface, so all you need to do is forward the same merchant request to Ethoca. We make a call to the Global Fraud Alliance database to retrieve the collaborative Signals, and we pass the Signals back to directly to your merchant customer as push-based email and/or portal alerts. More on Quickstart below.

• Fully integrated approach: you subscribe to our API receiving the Signals back in real-time for you to incorporate into your systems. 

Q: What do I do with a Signal?

Ethoca360 Signals is an anti-fraud solution, providing alerts to the positive or negative payment history associated with individual data elements of any given transaction. For example, the signals can show

• When past troubles happened
• Which industry(s) it was in
• How many merchants reported incidences, and
• Which data element caused a problem (but not the data itself)

You are free to interpret and present those results for your customers, and the merchant is free to make the final decision if that currently is the case. For example:

• The merchant might see that a history of chargebacks is limited to one particular company, decide that it must have been a customer service issue, and accept that transactions; or

• The merchant could set a high threshold and reject any transaction that comes with a warning Signal.

Download the Ethoca Guide for Partners to see a sample screen shot >>

Q: How is privacy and security of my clients’ data protected?

Collaboration does not mean sharing actual transaction data. It means sharing the experience and intelligence taken from the transaction experience(s).

Members of the Global Fraud Alliance pool their data in a repository where only Ethoca has access. Even then, the sensitive data can come to us hashed and encrypted. Not even our security experts can see it in its raw form. Our systems can tell what transaction the data refers to, and can look for matches among key values. For example (a very short list of examples):

• Does the customer email address have a history of good transactions behind it?
• Has the credit card number been associated with a high number of charge backs?

Based on that query, the system returns collaborative signals. So the members benefit from one another’s transaction experiences, but never see any other member’s raw transaction data.

Ethoca complies with PCI DSS. Network members who are PCI compliant remain so when they connect with Ethoca.

Q:  Who does Ethoca want as a partner?

Any organization that wants to help prevent card-not-present fraud and the cost: Payment processors, fraud-prevention vendors, identity solution providers, card acquirers, card issuers, resellers and industry organizations.

Q: What do I get?

You get several benefits from being an Ethoca partner:

1. First, you (or your customers) get the power that comes from more than 500 million transactions in the data pool. That gives you a stronger competitive position, increasing your profile as a service provider.
2. Your clients gain access to GFA member experiences from outside your network, closing the loop on fraudsters who leverage data silos to escape detection. And you can still run your own rules against the data.
3. Depending on your subscription you can get negative signals that flag any data element with a bad history, and positive signals that indicate a good transaction history.

Q: What are my obligations as an Ethoca partner?

To benefit from other members’ payment experience transaction data, you must contribute the data of your participating customers to the pool.

We also require you to be transparent about your membership in the Global Fraud Alliance, and your partnership with Ethoca. This helps to spread the word that you are taking a new strong action against fraud. A safer online environment means a more profitable online environment for all businesses (well not quite all if we consider the fraudsters’ business!).

Your customers will be reassured that you are taking the right steps to build a trustworthy environment for card not present transactions. An enhanced reputation can only draw more business your way.

Q: How does QuickStart speed up collaboration?

QuickStart offers a faster, more convenient and easier way for merchants to connect to Ethoca360 Signals in real time, bypassing the development work necessary to implement Ethoca's direct API.

There are two key pieces to QuickStart: Signal Request, and Signal Response.

• Signal Request: Instead of the merchant subscribing to Ethoca's API, Ethoca subscribes to the APIs already used by the merchant to send data to their payment or fraud service provider. Ethoca evaluates whatever elements are contained in this request and generates Signals based on the matches it finds in the GFA database.

• Signal Response: Ethoca passes the Signals back to the merchant in the form of a push-based email and/or portal-based alerts. It requires no changes or addition to the merchant’s existing tools.

Although in the longer term, merchants may desire to connect to Ethoca's API to pass and receive more information and benefit from the full range of Signals available, QuickStart eliminates the wait time to schedule IT development resources, and enables access to the benefits of Ethoca's real-time service in days, rather than weeks or months, at no additional cost to the merchant. QuickStart is also available for use by payment and fraud service providers.

QuickStart is available for the Ethoca360 Signals product.