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.
4. Please provide an overview of your organisation and what you do. 

Sift is the AI-powered fraud prevention solution safeguarding digital trust for enterprise businesses. Leveraging a vast Global Data Network of over 1 trillion annual events, Sift provides deep, identity-level insights to detect and mitigate emerging threats, ensuring secure transactions and seamless customer experiences. More than 700 customers globally and across industries are using Sift's fraud decisioning platform to transform trust into tangible business value, and risk into revenue.

2. How do you work in partnership with BR-DGE?  

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. 

3. Explain how your solution works. 

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.  

4. How important are partnerships to your organisation?  

Partnerships are intrinsic to Sift’s success. Working with fellow thought-leaders in Fraud and Risk helps us stay updated on the challenges our joint customers face, allowing us to better articulate how our AI and machine learning solutions combat fraudulent account creation, account takeovers (ATO), payments fraud, chargebacks, and policy abuse. We also provide dark web reviews to businesses, in order to highlight how organised fraud actors are collaborating to defraud them. 

Commercially, partnerships are highly beneficial. When we engage with partners, we offer complementary, non-competing services, sharing mutual customer introductions and rewarding referrals. Some partners integrate and resell our services, enhancing their own offerings and differentiating them in the market. Together, we help each other grow. 

5. What are the key ingredients for a successful partnership?  

Shared trust and reciprocity. Successful partnerships thrive on trust, defined goals, and a clear vision for helping our customers. We build trust with our partners through open communication and regular collaboration. We build trust through transparency and joint messaging that highlights each partner’s solution and how each solution works together to build a stronger, more secure business for joint customers. A shared vision aligns partners toward common objectives, guiding strategic decisions and ensuring cohesive efforts. Combined, these elements—trust, vision, and clear goals—form a robust foundation, enabling our partnerships to seize opportunities effectively, ultimately leading to sustainable business success. 

6. What current trends in digital payments are impacting your organisation? 

The entire payments ecosystem has seen rapid and significant change over the past few years, and many of them have directly impacted the way companies fight fraud: 

1. Rise of real-time payments: The increasing adoption of instant payment systems highlights the “need for speed” in detecting fraud as well.  

2. Cryptocurrency acceptance: Some merchants are beginning to accept cryptocurrencies, which introduces new fraud risks and challenges in transaction monitoring, particularly since crypto payments are not subject to the chargeback rules administered by traditional payments networks. 

3. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services: The growing popularity of BNPL options is creating new fraud vectors that organizations need to address through the implementation of their fraud strategies and understanding the different methods fraudsters are employing to bypass typical fraud detection methods. 

4. Cross-border e-commerce growth: Cross-border e-commerce growth presents both opportunities and challenges for organizations, particularly in the realm of fraud prevention. As businesses expand their reach globally, they encounter a complex landscape of diverse payment methods, regulations, and fraud patterns–all of which must be addressed. 

7. How has SCA/PDS2 impacted your product offering? 

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 optimize 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.