Building and maintaining trust is paramount to online marketplaces, which are often tasked with safeguarding the lives and property of their customers. Accordingly, the ramifications of losing that trust can be steep. In a 2021 PwC survey, 44% of consumers said they stopped buying from a company due to a lack of trust. People want to know their identity is in safe hands just as badly as merchants want to know if that identity is real — and should be allowed into their ecosystem.
Without face-to-face interaction, how does a digital marketplace gain trust on both sides without adding so much friction to the customer experience that they leave anyway?
Foundation for success
Trust is key to building a marketplace in the digital economy. Without its solid foundation, all it takes is a gust of wind — or a large-scale fraud attack — to send it all falling down and your customers taking their business elsewhere.
This, of course, flies in the face of the often-held belief that trust and safety — much like fraud prevention — is a cost center. Which means getting leadership buy-in to allot the necessary budget and resources to build a successful trust and safety department is often the first step to building that strong foundation. Below are three more.
3 Steps to build (and keep) trust
Risk-informed onboarding
Performing a risk assessment during onboarding can be tricky due to the limited information provided, as well as the need to keep friction as low as possible. That’s where Ekata’s account opening solution comes into play.
Powered by a proprietary data set and machine learning, this product only needs an IP address and phone or email to confidently and quickly assess the risk of new accounts in real-time. This enables marketplaces to create streamlined onboarding experiences for legitimate customers and to reject or add friction to high-risk customers. One Ekata customer, for example, was able to capture more than half of potential fraud (55%) during the initial step of the sign-up process.
Multi-factor authentication
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the best tools a marketplace has at its disposal to help stop account takeover. Implementing this type of check builds trust by making it more difficult for fraudsters to actually take over an account, and by adding visible friction to ensure the customer feels secure. It’s a perfect example of how not all friction is bad. Marketplaces looking to do even more in this arena may consider implementing workflows for the validation of profile changes — such as updating email or phone — and using one-time passcodes.
Enhanced Manual Review
With all sights set on automation, it’s important to remember how important a solid manual review team can be when it comes to stopping fraud. A manual review team can help ensure false positive rates are kept low and customer acquisition rates are kept high. It can do this by ensuring gray-area cases aren’t automatically flagged as fraudulent.
Identity Review 360 gives manual review agents the ability to assess risk, minimize onboarding time for new customers and detect and prevent fraud. This empowers manual review teams to make faster and more accurate identity fraud decisions on a global scale by getting the full picture of the identity behind a transaction in a single view.
