A rise in the sophistication of online fraudsters is a growing risk to Kenyan businesses and the customers they serve. Businesses that fail to protect their consumers from fraud will ultimately disappear as customers will tend to shun them.
As such, given that there are over 9.5 million e-commerce users in Kenya, businesses need to combine top notch security with a great customer experience if they are to protect their customers and thrive in an increasingly digital world.
According to PwC’s Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey 2018 ranked Kenya second behind South Africa on its list of Top 10 countries reporting the most economic crime. Furthermore, data from iovation, a TransUnion company, reveals that since 2009 online transactions from Africa were more likely to be fraudulent than any other continent.
To counter this, TransUnion has introduced a fraud prevention and identity management suite, IDVision with iovation . This is an enhanced fraud prevention suite which unifies personal and digital identities by combining TransUnion’s collection of over 58 million African consumer records, with the global device intelligence of iovation and its experience with over six billion devices worldwide since 2004 and nearly half a billion transactions coming from Africa over the past decade.
According to TransUnion, IDVision with iovation both fights and detects fraud while optimising customer convenience and security by:
- Establishing Identity: Identity is verified against a broad set of personal and digital data for greater identity confidence.
- Authenticating Customers: IDVision with iovation validates the customer’s claimed identity to confirm they are who they say they are. It employs methods that match the risk level by utilising authentication at specific touchpoints.
- Preventing Fraud: Fraud risk of online transactions or identities is assessed to identify potentially fraudulent actions or behaviours. Suspicious behaviour is investigated to identify inconsistent data elements.
Billy Owino, CEO of TransUnion Kenya, had this to say, “Identity verification is no longer limited to a set of core documents and a few pieces of personal information. It is about understanding someone’s digital footprint, the devices they use and how they use them. Only by combining personal and digital data, can businesses truly protect their most valuable asset – their customers,”