Emailage: Prudent Fraud Prevention Is Key To Canadian FinTech Startups

Emailage, the online fraud prevention startup that uses email addresses to assess risk, is expanding its operations in the Canadian market. The company recently brought Julien Phipps onboard as a senior business development director. Phipps said that the expansion is “an opportunity for us to leverage the work that we’ve been doing with email at [the] core of our solution.”

Already, there are many new FinTech startups in a few of Canada’s major cities and the different tech hubs. But while there is a huge appetite for these companies to launch, FinTech companies in Canada want to launch prudently. That’s where companies such as Emailage come in.

“We’re seeing an opportunity to be part of their ecosystem at an early stage,” Phipps said, adding that email is not an afterthought in these platforms, but a key part of them from the get-go.

Startups are nimble and quick to react, and as they reach a critical mass, they see companies like Emailage as a crucial element to their experience. While user experience is key, it’s also important to make sure their platforms are second-to-none in terms of safety, and are minimizing listing abuse for sites that have reviews. Emailage can serve various verticals. Not only can it work on preventing commercial transaction fraud, it can also make sure that bad actors don’t take over a site and downgrade the goodwill that a company has built.

In terms of differentiation, Emailage is not just a data aggregator: It seeks to operate at a deeper level, with a data science team that can look at unique trends for businesses and tweak different skillsets to allow for a more tailored approach to fraud prevention. In addition, Emailage can determine which outcomes will be more important than others.

“We have various machine learning and deep learning capabilities that are built into the algorithms behind our Emailage solution,” Phipps said, adding that it allows the company to react quickly, aggregate data and provide back alerts that work well within its consortium network.

That’s the key differentiator: People who are using the solution are actually sharing feedback on the Emailage network. Whether the company is utilizing and leveraging feedback from the Asian market or Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), it all “goes to help prevent fraud on a global scale.” In terms of Canada, specifically, Emailage is no stranger to the market, and already has a base of customers including larger airlines and banks – so it is familiar with the area. And the company realizes that the country provides good opportunity to grow. As a result, Emailage brought Phipps to help with boots-on-the-ground contact.

That strategy follows how Emailage usually does its expansion models – by having a global strategy with a local execution. Still, Emailage notes that fraud isn’t the same around the world; each region has its own nuances of the kinds of fraud that they see and how they handle them. Because of these differences, Emailage said it is important to have someone who understands these local differences and helps clients put up the good fight against the bad guys.