ACI Worldwide Teams With Ethoca On Merchant Fraud Alerts

ACI Worldwide, a provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, announced an integration agreement on Tuesday (Aug. 16) with Ethoca, a provider of collaboration-based technology solutions for credit card companies and online merchants.

Under the agreement, ACI will integrate Ethoca Alerts into its own eCommerce payments system, ACI UP eCommerce Payments. The integration should make the payments system available to thousands of online merchants and payment service providers worldwide, according to both companies.

“The integration of Ethoca Alerts gives PSPs, acquirers, processors and their merchant customers a powerful way to bolster their fraud defenses with card issuer-confirmed fraud and customer dispute data, while ensuring continued revenue growth,” according to the statement announcing the partnership.

Ethoca Alerts provides merchants with an “early warning” system whenever fraud or customer-disputed transactions are confirmed, which better allows the merchants to resolve the issue before it reaches the chargeback stage.

Through Ethoca Alerts, merchants on the network receive alerts as soon as cardholders confirm the fraud issue with their banks, instead of through a “slow, costly” chargeback process, which can sometimes take weeks. The alert gives merchants the heads-up, allows them an opportunity to stop the fulfillment of fraudulent goods or services and also issues a refund to the cardholder, thus eliminating the need for a chargeback in the first place.

“Our integration with the ACI UP eCommerce Payments solution makes Ethoca Alerts easily available to more than 130 payment service providers and thousands of their merchants,” Keith Briscoe, chief marketing officer at Ethoca, said in a statement. “As we bring on board more payment providers and top-tier merchants, the overall network effect increases. All participants — including Ethoca’s network of more than 545 card issuers — get more value by reducing fraud losses and eliminating more chargebacks.”