As B2B businesses continue to grow their e-commerce operations, concern about fraud is also growing. And rightfully so. A 2018 survey conducted by the Association for Financial Professionals found that a whopping 78 percent of organizations had been hit with fraud at least once in the previous year. And while fraudulent checks are the predominant form of fraud, 48 and 30 percent of survey respondents said their organization had been the victim of wire (ACH) and credit card fraud, respectively. What’s even scarier is only about 2/3rds of all fraud are detected in time and less than half are discovered within less than two weeks of the incident. Though the survey doesn’t necessarily distinguish between B2C and B2B firms, the reality is clear: Companies that don’t take the steps to protect themselves from fraud are taking great risks.
Here at Credit Key, security and fraud protection is a core component of our software. Because it’s important to our customers, here’s how Credit Key helps protect merchants from fraud—all while saving them a few bucks in the process!
One of the great things about technology is that we can build fraud detection into the process. Using traditional and non-traditional data sources we can identify patterns of fraudulent behaviors and build those into our algorithms. That means that each time someone applies for instant credit, we can check their purchase against a number of factors that might identify it as fraud. This is done automatically, while the applicant’s creditworthiness is also checked. All within about 30 seconds. And because it’s built right into the approval process, there are no additional steps that either the merchant or the applicant need to take.
Because of the way Credit Key is structured - where we take on the risk of financing credit and our merchant clients get paid within 48 hours - merchants’ exposure is completely eliminated when using Credit Key, at least as far as the financial side of transactions are concerned.
Of course, merchants using Credit Key still need to be vigilant about who they’re sending their products to. Luckily, this can be mitigated using software that alerts your team to potentially fraudulent transactions.
Fraud detection can be expensive, especially for firms that rely on manual review. Costs include staffing and training a team of fraud prevention specialists, lost time and productivity associated with fraud prevention, and of course, stolen merchandise and other lost expenses associated with fulfilling a fraudulent order. According to PYMNTS.com, an industry website for the payment industry, this will all add up to $7.2 billion by 2020. What’s more is that merchants are typically only able to check about 27 percent of orders, leaving the door wide open to fraud. Yikes!
Luckily, Credit Key is designed to help lower staffing costs associated with staffing and managing an internal credit department. From a fraud prevention perspective, this means that we can help reduce the costs associated with having to conduct manual checks for transactions. In other words, using Credit Key, merchants typically require fewer people to conduct the same level of business and fraud prevention.
Pretty cool, right?
If you want to learn more how Credit Key can help protect your business from fraud, contact us. We’re happy to show you how it works and how it can help you grow.