One of the big advantages of a digital economy is the ability to connect and transact around the world, regardless of physical location. Of course, this advantage brings with it some challenges for fraud prevention teams; namely, bad actors can now attack from across the globe. The ability to assess address risk through address verification and address validation software and APIs software is a must for any consumer business with an online presence. Of course, not all address verification APIs are built the same.
Before we examine what makes our Address Risk API stand out, let’s examine what address verification is and why address validation is necessary.
What are address verification services?
Address verification services perform real-time capture to validate the address data entered by a customer.
For fraudsters, a mailing address offers a lot of opportunity. Indeed, the act of address fraud (using a fake or incorrect address) goes hand in hand with cybercrimes such as account takeover attacks, payment/credit card fraud, identity theft and more.
By understanding what address fraud is and how to detect it, businesses can use address verification services to catch fraudulent schemes before they cause significant harm.
What types of businesses benefit from address validation?
E-commerce
Online retailers have a vested interest in ensuring their shipments to customers arrive at their intended destination. Address validation APIs can help prevent return shipping fees, customer service hours required for lost items or lost goods shipped to incorrect addresses. Furthermore, in an ever-competitive market, by ensuring address verification, online retailers can prevent reputation damage to their brand when customers have a bad experience.
Marketplaces
For those who use marketplaces to buy and sell, address verification APIs can help to mitigate scams and other abuses associated with fraudulent listings. When a fraudster cannot easily fake their location, their ability to scam other marketplace users is impeded. Furthermore, address validation contributes to the trust and safety of a marketplace platform by ensuring a new user can be verified without impacting the user experience.
What should businesses look for in an address verification provider?
It’s important for businesses to do their due diligence in securing a provider that partners best fit with their needs. While different solutions will offer varying features, there are a few non-negotiables.
Data
To ensure an address verification API provides the best return on investment, businesses need to know the data network their service is validating the address against is high-quality, extensive and global.
Integration capabilities
Businesses should consider investing in address verification solutions that can be seamlessly integrated within their own internal systems. This not only simplifies business operations, but it can also enable address verification accuracy across the entire business.
Reputation
No matter your business, it deserves to partner with the best. Especially when it comes to data management, it is imperative that businesses only entrust the most trustworthy address verification data providers. Before making the final decision, check out use-cases, testimonials and the varying processes involved in integrating an address verification API.
How is our Address Risk API different?
Where some address validation simply confirms the validity of a mailing address, our Address Risk API is designed to provide rich metadata and risk signals around any given address in the world, in fractions of a second. The use of this technology to assess risk and confirm legitimacy is key to predicting whether a customer is engaging in fraudulent activity.
Benefits of using an Address Verification Service
Reduce operational costs
By implementing address validation checks, businesses can reduce the costs of order reprocessing, shipping correction surcharges, drain on resources due to customer service requests from address issues and the loss of customer loyalty.
Optimize customer workflows
By assessing the risk of an address early on in an interaction, businesses can optimize customer workflows, only adding friction to the workflow of those whose addresses return with high-risk signals while minimizing the impact on low-risk addresses.
Optimized customer workflows reduce the friction for customers with low-risk addresses; thus, creating a smoother and more seamless transaction – increasing the overall customer experience and reducing the likelihood of abandoned transactions and driving revenue growth.
Validate and normalize global addresses
By verifying the validity of an address to a specific level (for example a street or unit number), businesses can significantly reduce undeliverable addresses in their database. Better still, businesses can also receive consistently formatted addresses for their models and rules-based systems. This, in turn, reduces the need for manual review cleansing.
Catch suspicious addresses and prevent fake addresses
By leveraging unique identifiers to perform velocity calculations and eliminate address tumbling (when a fraudster submits transactions multiple times with the same address), businesses can catch addresses that are suspiciously overused. Moreover, using unique risk signals from Mastercard Identity’s Identity Network enables businesses a greater understanding of how an address was used in other online transactions.
To better understand how these benefits come to parse, look at the key features of the Address Risk API.
Address Verification Features with Address Risk API
Global coverage
Our address verification solution offers coverage for addresses globally.
Transaction-level intelligence
The five signals derived from our award-winning Identity Network provide insight into how a specific address is being used online. For example, this could include how often it is used, the number of businesses it has been used at, how often it has been used with other signals (such as name, phone number, IP address and email) and the first and last time it was used online.
Easy integration
As with all our solutions, Address Risk API allows for easy, flexible and reliable integrations into the systems of businesses across industries.
Final thoughts
Address verification providers all aim to validate, correct and standardize addresses around the globe. However, simply validating an address may no longer be enough for fraud operations and product management teams in the above verticals (and then some). With more growth in a digital economy, businesses need to move beyond simple address validation to rapid risk decisioning.
To learn more about how our Address Risk API can help your business boost operational efficiency with best-in-class address verification software, contact us today.
