Emailage: The Underbelly Of Enterprise Security

It can be argued that “Shoot me an email with the details” has become an all-too-common phrase among not just friends and family members, but also colleagues and enterprises around the world. In this hectic age, some businesses may focus mostly on securing the typical high-level document access points. But an important element in the hacker-prevention playbook may be off executives’ radar: fraud prevention and identity validation using the email address.

Leading financial organizations around the world to a safer digital space is something that’s always top-of-mind for CEO Rei Carvalho and his team at Emailage, an Arizona-based, platform-agnostic, fraud mitigation products and solutions company.

Carvalho shared with PYMNTS that because the email address is used around the world, it is essentially the backbone of most any transaction. The email address is also a key data point to help determine consumer behavioral patterns — and a perfect element to ensure identity validation.

Emailage combines vast email transaction history, machine learning algorithms and positive and negative data to generate a predictive risk score. Risk scores help improve the risk assessment of any transaction in which an email address is provided, and also to validate its initiator. Use cases include online transactions, new accounts/sign up processes, customer account maintenance and marketplace listings, among others.

“Nobody wants to call someone that’s a [legitimate] customer [for identity validation],” Carvalho said. “It costs money for those companies to fully stop an order to make a call for verification.”

As such, the ability to maintain a solid profile is dependent upon not only regular account maintenance but also sharing information across different paths in the enterprise arena to ensure fraud prevention.

“We do have the deep linkages to ensure we’re establishing use patterns,” said Manoel Coelho, Emailage’s chief revenue officer. “Because of our access to multiple industries, the information does not exist in silos.”