Over the past decade, e-commerce has experienced a period of exponential growth. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, customers have opted to use e-commerce services to shop online more frequently. Orders and transactions are mostly conducted online with little to no human contact. This is very convenient for both parties as businesses get to save on costs as customers get to make hassle-free purchases. Unfortunately, online fraud has also been on a positive trend. In 2020, there was a $17 billion loss incurred by e-commerce businesses and this figure rose to $20 billion in 2021.
Current fraudsters abuse a high reap on return on investment (ROI), giving them the resources to orchestrate well-funded attacks while effectively protecting themselves from being discovered. This presents an urgent need to have a solution that protects these businesses from online fraud.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection was built specifically to combat this. It aims to help online businesses mitigate fraud while keeping their doors open for their customers. Initially, this solution was developed to prevent payment fraud. This entailed:
- Increasing bank acceptance rates and
- Improving the shopping experience for customers.
Subsequent release waves are adding more features to increase the capabilities of this service.
How does Fraud Protection help you protect your business?
Needless to say, Microsoft has a very large e-commerce business in the products they offer. An intricate technology stack had to be built to ensure the safety of this platform. This same technology was extended to build Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. Fraud Protection employs account and forensics data to identify and prevent fraudulent account creation. It also employs adaptive AI and machine learning to assess fraud during the most important steps of creating accounts permitting account blocking before fraudulent activity.
Fraud protection has the following capabilities to help protect your business.
- AI and insights from the fraud protection network
Fraud protection utilizes Microsoft’s AI platform that takes advantage of records of transaction history to determine whether a transaction is fraudulent. If a given transaction is linked with previous fraudulent activity, it will be flagged. Being a part of this network enables you to benefit from the collective experience of other users of Fraud Protection.
- Device fingerprinting
A device fingerprint contains all information about a remote device such as a computer, gaming console, etc., and is used to identify it. Device fingerprinting is based on AI. During online transactions, device fingerprinting lets you collect an important combination of information on the identity of the devices involved such as location, IP address, etc. that is useful in identifying fraud.
- A rules engine
Fraud protection lets you create rules based on the score generated by its AI model. These rules can then be used to convert assessment into a decision such as Approve, Reject, Review, or Challenge.
- Virtual fraud analyst
Based on Fraud Protection’s AI capabilities, the virtual fraud analyst provides a historical view of your data to enable you to develop risk score thresholds. Just like the rules engine, this information can be used to influence a decision whether to accept or reject a customer’s transactions.
- Transactions acceptance booster
This feature is meant to boost the bank’s acceptance rates by sharing trust knowledge with banks to get more returns for your business. You can also receive MID recommendations and add them to authorization requests.
Other features are a graph explorer, to understand connections between your data, and a scorecard to assess your monthly performance in fraud protection.
What’s new with Fraud Protection?
The October 2021 release of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection included these new features:
- Enablement of the Payment Service Provider
- Deeper fraud analytics and reporting for purchase and account protection scenarios
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is a powerful tool for e-commerce businesses to utilize in protecting them from online fraud. The incorporation of AI capabilities makes this solution self-sufficient, not needing constant human intervention. E-commerce businesses can now avoid a lot of loss as a result of fraud thanks to this solution.
