PayGate partners with ReD to beef up online fraud protection

Ecommerce payment service provider PayGate recently partnered with global fraud prevention company ReD in an effort to beef up security against fraud for its South African online merchants.

Fraud, or the fear thereof, is often seen as one of the main deterrents for people flocking to online shops. Rightly so, reports suggest that losses due to credit card fraud increased by 23% from R366-million in 2013 to R453.9-million in 2014. Even though not all of these cases relate to online shopping, it does follow a similar trend as the online space grows to be more popular.

Read more: South Africans beware, cybercriminals are coming for you

“As ecommerce in South Africa has matured, more and more local merchants are doing business outside our borders,” says PayGate’s head of business development Brendon Williamson. “This means we need to expand the protection we offer merchants as well. Our fraud screening needs to cover the whole world, not just South Africa.”

Williamson says that one of the capabilities of ReD Shield that stands out most is the fact that enterprise clients will be able to tailor-make their own risk management that suite their specific needs.

He explains that “airlines are most vulnerable to one kind of fraud, retailers to another. ReD offers our clients the ability to define rules and checks that fit their own business, either directly through our portal or in consultation with our risk specialists.”

Earlier this year PayGate, which is linked to more than 70 banks in over 30 countries, partnered with US payment giant PayPal in a mission to boost cross-border ecommerce between South Africa and other markets.

Read more: PayPal strengthens presence in SA with PayGate partnership

“ReD’s fraud protection capability is high-powered and complex,” says ReD VP Sales Africa Lee-Anne Porter. “It combines a global database of fraud information, rule sets and a neural network that has the ability to learn from experience about fraud patterns and behaviours and apply those learnings to improve fraud detection.”