Prove Identity Teams With Elo to Fight Fraud in Brazil

Prove Identity says Brazilian payment tech company Elo will use its technology to battle fraud.

The partnership, announced Thursday, will let Elo leverage Prove’s identity verification solutions to improve its customer experiences while also fighting SIM swap fraud and the rise of “orange accounts” in Brazil.

“We are thrilled that Elo has joined the growing number of Brazilian companies benefitting from Prove’s digital identity solutions,” Scott Bonnell, Prove’s revenue chief, said in a news release.

“With Prove’s unique technology, which gives companies insight into the risk of a given phone number, Elo and its owners and card issuers will be able to verify user identities, and detect and prevent SIM swap fraud while also improving customer experiences and accelerating revenue.”

According to the release, SIM swap fraud happens when scammers gain access to a mobile subscriber’s information and transfer their phone number to a new SIM card that the criminals control. This gives them access to information like bank account details.

Prove says its Trust Score+ solution will give Elo a way to evaluate mobile transactions’ trustworthiness and lower the risk of SIM swap fraud.

Orange accounts, meanwhile, refer to the unauthorized opening of bank accounts by individuals or criminal organizations for money laundering or fraud. Prove says its solutions can help identify and prevent such accounts.

The partnership comes as businesses continue to struggle with combating fraud. For example, recent PYMNTS Intelligence shows that while 90% of online retailers have the tools to analyze the cause of failed payments only a third have a way to identify potential fraud as the cause. 

In addition, while online retailers estimate that an average of 11% of customer payments fail — a serious detriment to sales — 82% of these businesses say it is challenging to identify the cause of failed payments.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke earlier this year with Nicole Jass, Prove’s chief product officer, about the “Holy Grail” of passwordless experiences, in which a user is able to create an account and use biometric tools to log in, without ever setting up a password.

In that world, she said, there are no more tradeoffs, like using a strong password that’s easier to forget or a weak one that’s simpler to remember but also less secure.

“You won’t need to think about passwords,” she said, adding that “you just log in.” Additionally, the device that’s so ever-present in everyone’s hand — the mobile phone — is another line of defense that helps businesses make sure that consumers are properly identified and verified.