Airbnb’s Data Sharing, Rental ‘Blacklist’ Signal Drive to Secure Platforms 

The connected economy leads to the (data) sharing economy — which leads to a safer economy, for consumers and especially for platforms.

News came this week that, per comments made by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to Bloomberg TV, the online marketplace would be “absolutely” willing to share information on listings that are deemed dangerous — and would share that data with rival platforms.

The goal, as reported, would be to make sure that those listings do not pop up, well, anywhere — we posit it helps shape a “listings blacklist” that keeps the community at large safer. And it builds on an existing policy wherein Airbnb already shares data with Expedia about so-called “party” houses.

In that wider data-sharing eventually, with greater data on hand, and spread among the online booking/travel ecosystem, Airbnb and Expedia and, we would assume, Hotels.com and others would work in a concerted effort to protect end users. It also signals a willingness to break down a “silo” mentality that exists when companies collect and store (and use) information on transactions and on consumers.

Strengthening the Bonds 

One by-product would be that the bonds of trust would be strengthened between consumers and their chosen providers. Industry-wide collaboration can foster greater trust, too, in conducting all manner of activities online.

Research earlier this year found that consumers are likely to increase, or at least maintain, the range and frequency of activities done online — browsing, shopping, buying — because it saves them time and makes things easier.

Read also: Pandenomics Study: Many Shifters Prefer Digital Living To The Physical World

But underneath it all, perhaps not surprisingly, lies concern — on the part of consumers, at least — that all sorts of vulnerabilities are in the (online) mix as their data moves across financial institutions (FIs), the card networks, the merchants themselves. The negative ripple effect when fraud does happen is especially acute at the merchant side of the commerce equation. Customers tend to vote with their feet when things go wrong, when the trust over data is breached. PYMNTS data show that two-thirds of consumers would opt not to continue doing business with a merchant after experiencing data theft or fraud.

Read more: Two-Thirds of Consumers Have ‘Zero Tolerance’ for eCommerce Fraud

Against that backdrop, collaboration becomes key as providers and other enterprises work together to tackle bad actors. A unified approach to data sharing — call it the consortium approach — can be found in various major economic regions around the world.

In the United States, for example, there’s the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (abbreviated as FS-ISAC) with more than 16,000 active users across banks and various governmental agencies spread out among 70 countries that shares threat analysis and assessments. Early Warning Services, also tied to a consortium approach, has brought together several of the country’s largest banks to speed real-time payments but also battle identity-related and financial services-related fraud.

In Europe, there exists the Europol Financial Intelligence Public Private Partnership, which is a European partnership spanning several countries — between investigative services, financial intelligence units and banking institutions, per the consortium’s site, that “give insight into financial crime and money laundering.” Financial firms in France, Italy and Luxembourg, along with Dutch FIs, share data on unusual or suspicious transactions exchanged across the partnerships’ networks.

Separately, in a recent PYMNTS interview, Jesse Chenard, CEO at MonetaGo, detailed the launch of a platform, the MonetaGo Secure Financing Platform, to fight duplicate financing fraud (and generally, trade finance fraud), also through a collaborative — and global — approach.

Read here: Duplicate Financing Fraud Faces New Foe That Sheds Light on an Elusive Thief

The general trend, then, may be to break down silos, to share data among banks, the payment networks and the platforms, in pursuit of the common good.