Visa Teams With F5 on Secure eCommerce Checkout for Merchants

Security firm F5 has partnered with Visa to help merchants reduce friction at checkout.

“Customers expect seamless commerce experiences and transactions to be secure,” the companies said in a news release Monday (March 6). “Yet, in today’s digital-first world, customers are under threat from bad actors looking to steal data and commit fraud.”

According to the release, F5 helps prevent this through its Distributed Cloud Authentication Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence and behavior analytics to recognize returning customers, eliminating their need to log in with a username and password.

“Customer recognition at the beginning of the customer journey now enables customer personalization and reduces the inefficiency of guest checkout,” the release says.

And because F5’s cloud authentication tool combines with its Cloud Bot Defense, merchants can also access fraud defenses and bot detection to protect the entire buying journey, “instead of historically where solutions have been limited to identifying bots only during checkout,” the companies said in the release.

The partnership comes one week after the White House debuted a $1.6 billion plan to beef up fraud protection tools after “past underinvestment in basic technology,” and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that U.S. consumers alone lost $8.8 billion to a variety of fraudulent schemes in 2022.

It’s this trend that’s led businesses to increase their own investments in fraud prevention.

“[Fraud protection] benefits the merchant by increasing profitability and reducing fraud rates and operational costs, and it benefits the customer who gets authenticated and not rejected because they’re wrongly perceived to be a risk,” Shimon Steinmetz, chief financial officer at automated risk assessment and fraud prevention solution Vesta, told PYMNTS last week.

New research in PYMNTS’ 2023 “B2B Payments Fraud Tracker” shows more than 70% of businesses say they need additional digital fraud solutions to remain hypervigilant as fraudsters and scammers increasingly test their perimeters for cracks and weaknesses.

Providing a frictionless customer experience is one of the key reasons why more and more companies are investing in fraud prevention.

PYMNTS’ research finds that more than 8 out of 10 finance chiefs (85%) say they prioritize fraud controls for incoming payments. Because fraud is a ubiquitous problem, solving it is a critical competitive advantage.

“If you’re a merchant today you have to have a digital strategy, you just do,” Steinmetz said. “That’s why these fraud solutions are only becoming more important. … They need to stay ahead of these global changes in consumer consumption.”