Fraud Prevention with Stripe

As you may be aware your PayNow App allows you to accept payments using Stripe, a worldwide payment processing company. Stripe is one of the biggest platforms for card payment processing in the world and is used by millions of companies including large corporates like Amazon and Google.

Stripe launched in 2011 and is headquatered in San Fancisco.  It operates 9 global offices with more than 1500 employees. Bloomberg suggests that Stripe is now a $20b company which places it amoung a handful of the world’s most valuable private startups.

So when it comes to fraud prevention let’s take a look at how Stripe operates.

First, let’s point out that your PayNow App does not store any sensitive card data. The App uses Stripes mobile Application Programming Interface (API) to encrypt and pass data to the Stripe server where it is securely processed as a Card Not Present (CNP) transaction.

Stripe is certified to the highest level of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance. This is a set of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, which sets the requirements for organizations and sellers to safely and securely accept, store, process and transmit cardholder data during credit card transactions to prevent fraud and data breaches.

Stripe provides a suite of tools called “Radar” to help monitor and catch fraudulent transactions. Stripe Radar is centered around a machine learning system that provides real-time transaction scoring based upon thousands of signals about each incoming card payment. This assists to predict whether a payment is likely to be fraudulent.

The machine learning system is continuously learning from new customer purchasing patterns and payments that are flagged as fraudulent. Stripe uses data from its entire network of millions of business to evaluate risk levels on each payment processed and this has prevented many fraudulent payment attempts.

Stripe advises that when a business using Stripe sees a card for the first time, there’s an 80% chance that they’ve seen the card elsewhere on the Stripe network in the past.

Stripe Radar also increases the level of authentication for each transaction by prompting for Card Verification Code (CVC) and postal code details to increase the level of authentication. By auto-rejecting suspicious transactions and notifying you of questionable charges you can make the most informed decisions as to whether to accept a charge.         

Fraud prevention across the payments industry is a continuous process that is supported by your vigilance when accepting payments and by Stripe with its global technology capability. While this may never eliminate fraud altogether it will contribute to significant reductions in fraudulent transactions across the worldwide network.

Jo Coveney is a passionate photographer and online marketing content creator. She loves following the latest developments in technology and design trends across the globe.