SEATTLE-- January 20, 2022 -- Ekata, a global leader in digital identity verification, today expanded its account opening solutions to help online businesses worldwide quickly identify and flag risky account sign-ups. Powered by a proprietary data set and machine learning, Ekata's account opening solutions assess the risk of new accounts in real-time, enabling businesses to create streamlined onboarding experiences for legitimate customers and reject or add friction to high-risk customers. Ekata’s new capabilities expand its existing account opening solution for financial services and fintech companies.

Increasingly, fraud occurs earlier in the customer journey at the account creation stage, not just during transactions. In the past year alone, more than half of ecommerce companies experienced an increase in promotion abuse, with individuals creating multiple accounts to take advantage of limited-time promotions, causing significant loss to retailers. Marketplaces have also seen more malicious users impacting platform integrity via policy abuse. This type of activity is driving the need for stronger measures to keep those actors off a platform entirely or limit their movement.

According to Ekata’s research, almost one quarter of shoppers abandon their shopping cart because they’re asked to create an account — streamlining the sign-up process is key to combating this figure and onboarding more customers. By only requiring phone or email and an IP address to make a risk assessment, companies can use Ekata’s new solution to maintain low-friction sign-up flows that don’t require customers to enter their name or physical address.

Ekata’s account opening solutions have demonstrated success in helping online businesses catch suspected fraud early and quickly, as well as confidently onboard more verified customers:

· For one ecommerce company that experienced a targeted fraud attack, nearly all fraudulent actors (91%) using email addresses with custom domains were identified during account creation — preventing them from engaging in further fraudulent activity.
· A sizable increase in approval rates (17%) was achieved using Ekata’s account opening solutions.
· One customer captured more than half of true fraud (55%) during the initial step of the sign-up process.
· The new solution returns a response in less than 100ms, which enables real-time risk assessment during account sign-up.

According to Darren Cody, product manager at Bunking, a social marketplace that connects people through flexible shared living stays and travel experiences, “Ekata has been instrumental in helping Bunking proactively finetune our fraud solution to safeguard marketplace trust and safety. With easily provided personal information, we’re able to create different workflows based on risk profiles — eliminating any potential onboarding friction for good customers while protecting our community.”

“Our account opening solutions are hugely successful in helping financial institutions streamline onboarding and prevent fraud during account creation. We’re thrilled to expand these solutions to businesses in the ecommerce and marketplace spaces, especially with account opening fraud on the rise across the globe,” said Jordan Reynolds, VP of Market Strategy, Ecommerce and Marketplaces at Ekata. “Online businesses typically rely on their own internal data to understand the risk of an account, but this takes time and multiple interactions with a customer. Our solution provides risk assessments in real-time, helping businesses onboard more customers at scale and stop fraud in its tracks.”