Meet the partner: Sift

1. At BR-DGE, our partners are integral to our ecosystem and critical to our customers’ success.
2. In our Meet the Partner series, we highlight key collaborations, showcasing the products, functionality, and benefits they deliver.
3. We spoke with Matt Thom, Strategic Partnerships Director at Sift, to explore their innovative fraud prevention solution. We discuss the importance of partnerships in payments, our joint efforts with merchants, and the key elements for a successful collaboration.

Please provide an overview of Sift and what you do.

Sift is an AI-powered fraud prevention solution that safeguards digital trust for enterprise businesses. By leveraging a vast Global Data Network of over 1 trillion annual events, Sift delivers deep, identity-level insights to detect and mitigate emerging threats. As a result, it ensures secure transactions and seamless customer experiences. Currently, more than 700 customers globally and across industries rely on Sift's fraud decisioning platform. In doing so, they transform trust into tangible business value, and risk into revenue.

How do you collaborate in a payment partnership with BR-DGE?

2. BR-DGE are a trusted Partner of Sift’s. By integrating our solution to BR-DGE’s payment orchestration platform, we enable customers to implement fraud decisioning faster and at scale, while conserving resources and lowering costs.  

Importantly, customers will be able to access Sift no matter who their payments partner is, as BR-DGE offers scalability across their pre-integrated partnerships network. Merchants on the BR-DGE platform will be able to easily access the suite of Sift services to reduce risk and keep costs low, helping them to supercharge secure growth. 

Explain how your solution works.

3. Sift has spent the last 13 years building and refining our expertise in creating AI-powered models to help our customers predict and prevent fraud throughout the user journey. We continue to push boundaries in our market, as evidenced by our 18 AI-related patents and new modeling techniques like Cohort Modeling and Ensemble Tuning.  

We enable fraud teams to automate, investigate, and report with ease using the Sift Console, a Clearbox Decisioning engine. We provide fraud teams with transparency by surfacing meaningful insights, and with control by providing the tools to drive meaningful action in real time.  

How important are partnerships to your organisation?

4. Partnerships are key to Sift's success. Collaborating with fraud and risk experts keeps us informed on our customers' challenges. This helps us show how our AI and machine learning solutions fight account creation fraud, ATOs, payment fraud, chargebacks, and policy abuse. We also provide dark web reviews to reveal how organized fraudsters target businesses.
5. Partnerships are also commercially valuable. We offer complementary, non-competing services and share customer referrals. Some partners integrate and resell our services, boosting their own offerings and standing out in the market. Together, we help each other grow.

What are the key ingredients for a successful payment partnership?

5. Shared trust and reciprocity are key to successful partnerships. To begin with, these relationships thrive on trust, defined goals, and a clear vision for helping our customers. We build trust through open communication and regular collaboration. Additionally, transparency and joint messaging highlight each partner’s solution and how they work together to create stronger, more secure businesses for joint customers.
6. Furthermore, a shared vision aligns partners toward common objectives. This alignment guides strategic decisions and ensures cohesive efforts. Together, these elements form a solid foundation that enables partnerships to seize opportunities effectively. Ultimately, this leads to sustainable business success.

What current trends in digital payments are impacting your organisation?

The payments ecosystem has seen rapid changes in recent years. These shifts have directly impacted how companies fight fraud:

1. Rise of real-time payments: Instant payments demand faster fraud detection. The "need for speed" in spotting fraud has become crucial.
2. Cryptocurrency acceptance: Some merchants now accept cryptocurrencies. This brings new fraud risks, as crypto payments don't follow traditional chargeback rules. Monitoring these transactions is more challenging.
3. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL): BNPL services are growing in popularity. This creates new fraud risks, requiring companies to adapt their strategies. Fraudsters are finding new ways to bypass standard detection methods.
4. Cross-border e-commerce growth: Expanding globally opens up new opportunities and challenges. Businesses face diverse payment methods, regulations, and fraud patterns. All of these must be tackled to prevent fraud effectively.

How has SCA/PDS2 impacted your product offering?

7. To help customers address PDS2 requirements, Sift has continued to expand the flexibility of their automation capabilities focused on driving safe 3DS exemptions. This includes the ability to AI-powered Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA), exemption criteria (e.g. low risk, low amount, Merchant Initiated Criteria), and custom risk signals to determine which interactions are eligible for 3DS exemptions.  

In addition, Sift has developed key capabilities that simplify and optimise SCA exemptions, including: 

• RiskWatch: Enables businesses to simplify 3DS exemptions by consistently sending their highest risk percentile segment for 3DS based on AI-powered TRAs//  

• Workflow Simulation: Empowers front-line fraud teams to pinpoint how to fine-tune their 3DS automation strategies to proactively optimize 3DS exemptions as market conditions change.  

• Alternative Payment Methods (APMs): A key part of determining TRA accuracy often includes the different risk levels of different payment methods. Sift makes it easy for businesses to include APMs that are automatically included in Sift’s ML model and automation.