Startup Roundup: Across Channels And Borders

It’s been an exciting month for startups. One launched a new fraud module after a successful beta phase; another officially integrated with international payment rails; a third was white-labeled by one of the top five merchant acquirers in the world (and also got a new CEO).

Plus, words of wisdom for retailers as they brace for the holidays: More eCommerce traffic means more fraud, so what does that mean for the merchant?

Tipalti

After stopping 7,400 fraudulent payments over a six-month beta phase, this San Mateo startup’s new fraud monitoring module, Tipalti Detect, went live at the beginning of October. Those 7,400 transactions amounted to around $4 million in prevented fraud.

Tipalti’s CMO, Rob Israch, explained that the module looks for patterns across the supplier database, analyzing factors like tax data, contact information and IP address. If, for example, a payee’s name doesn’t match his or her payment details or tax ID number, Tipalti Detect will flag it.

Of course, because the system is just looking for patterns, Israch said the Detect numbers are much higher than the 7,400 instances that turned out to be fraud. Tipalti Detect is just the first line of defense. Ultimately, Israch noted, it’s up to the customer’s finance team to investigate why the transaction was flagged and whether it wishes to allow or prevent it.

nanopay

Toronto-based tech startup nanopay recently integrated with local payment rails in Canada and India to power cross-border payments between the two countries.

The founder and CEO of nanopay, Laurence Cooke, says the company’s mission is to simplify the costly, time-consuming and risk-heavy process of sending payments across borders by serving as a payments middleman.

This delivers four key benefits, Cooke said. First, it removes the credit risk of holding funds in foreign banks. Second, it removes the currency risk, since exchange rates can fluctuate while those funds are sitting in foreign currencies in international banks. Third, it reduces the AML (anti-money laundering) risk by cutting out the many hops of direct point-to-point communication in a shrinking corresponding banking landscape.

Finally, it reduces the spread banks must offer to the end user, since banks are guaranteed the same exchange rate they offer to customers, even if exchange rates fluctuate between the time of transaction and the time of settlement.

Emailage

The holiday season means more eCommerce traffic, and therefore, more fraud attempts – no surprise there. Overwhelmed with transactions, merchants don’t always notice fraudulent activity.

Arizona-based startup Emailage, an identity verification company that delivers risk scores to financial institutions (FIs) and online merchants based on customers’ email addresses, doesn’t think the holidays should be any less secure than any other time of year.

That’s why the startup is urging its customers to beef up staffing and approach the season with a plan. Emailage, too, is ramping up staffing, since a delay from the company trickles down through its clients and to end consumers, who are quick to abandon shopping carts if they experience delays.

According to Emailage, banks, too, would be wise to exercise caution, since many people apply for credit to finance holiday spending – and there are a lot of new identities on the black market for fraudsters to try to pass off as their own. Thanks again, Equifax.

Amaryllis

This startup has been incubating since 2011, but it wasn’t until 2015 that it started working on its end-to-end third-party payments platform – and it wasn’t until this year that the platform started gaining traction, having recently been white-labeled by one of the top five merchant acquirers in the world.

Amaryllis crafts modular solutions for payment facilitators (PayFacs) and merchant acquirers, which can be implemented – in whole or in part – in any system serving multiple sellers and buyers. There are modules for onboarding submerchants and managing fraud and risk, all the way through to settlement, reconciliation and reporting.

In July, Amaryllis welcomed CEO Mark Bishopp to the team. A former executive at Bank of America Merchant Services, Bishopp believed a third-party payments solution was needed because acquirers were not developing their own in the robust way it needed to happen – leaving global marketplaces like Uber and Amazon to match buyers and sellers with no help from banks or financial institutions.

This month, PYMNTS named Amaryllis among its “Payments Power Platforms Top 10” in the Payment Powering Platforms Tracker.