TSYS brings strong, real-time authentication to Europe

As ecommerce merchants struggle to meet the European Union’s revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), TSYS launched an advanced technology platform designed to validate customers and combat application, transaction and account takeover fraud. The TSYS Authentication Platform went live Sept. 12, 2019, two days before PSD2’s new provisions, including its Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) mandate, became effective. The solution will be launched in North America in 2020, TSYS representatives stated.

Justin Griggs, senior vice president of product strategy and commercialization for TSYS Issuer Solutions, said remote transactions involving fake identities and account takeovers are a growing concern for merchants, issuers and regulators. Issuers that pass through synthetic identities incur direct losses in the form of chargebacks and other unanticipated consequences, he stated.

Noting that the TSYS platform combines machine learning with its own curated insights to help financial institutions authenticate remote consumer and commercial interactions, Griggs said, “TSYS offers products and services that leverage where we sit in the transaction flow and provide real-time, informed opinions about financial transactions, remote account originations, customer profile updates, password change requests.”

Defeating fake IDs

Comparing fraud to a waterbed, Griggs stated that Europe reduced ecommerce fraud with chip & PIN but “push down on one area, and fraud bubbles up elsewhere in the ecosystem.” The platform’s flexible architecture enables it to adapt to changing authentication trends, he noted. “TSYS and partners fight fake IDs by deploying a platform with a configurable set of rules,” he added. “We never intended to be a biometric vault, because we want to keep pace with biometrics a month from now while enabling users to plug in the next cool authentication method.”

TSYS pointed out that four partners helped TSYS develop the platform in the following ways:

• Featurespace, a company specializing in behavioral analytics, provided multitenant capabilities that facilitate advanced decisioning with an industry-wide view of new fraud vectors.

• Emailage, an online fraud prevention and email risk assessment company, uses technology to analyze email address and global network metadata to generate multidimensional identity profiles and render fraud risk scores.

• InAuth, a digital device intelligence company, specializes in using browser and app information to authenticate online transactions. This ensures that the trustworthiness of TSYS customer devices interacting with digital channels, mobile apps, mobile web and desktop environments.

• Payfone, a digital identity authentication network, enables consumers and businesses to transact with trust across all channels. Payfone uses real-time, passive authentication and predictive identity to improve “pass rates” and thwart synthetic IDs and identity theft. The company’s proprietary Trust Score measures potential risk associated with digital identities.

TSYS will continue to deploy authentication solutions to help payment card issuers defend against all forms of authentication fraud, Griggs noted. “Authentication plays a crucial part across the entire payments chain,” he said. “Every action that a payment card issuer takes, from an account origination decision to an authorized transaction, is a potential failure point where a system could get compromised.”

For more information about the TSYS Authentication Platform, visit www.tsys.com/authentication-platform . To hear more about this from Justin Griggs, visit  youtu.be/xaprD7Gq_NA .

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