Email is the most common form of digital ID, used to login to websites, complete transactions and more besides. This means that over time each email address develops its own unique reputation and digital life based on its past behavior and actions online.
Phoenix-based startup company Emailage has used this to develop a risk scoring system for email addresses which will help companies to reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. Emailage has successfully flagged over 2 million transactions as risky in the past year alone, amounting to $150 million it's saved customers. The company has now received $3.8 million in venture capital funding to further develop its product.
"Email is the most unique and common ID in the online world," says Rei Carvalho, CEO of Emailage. "By using our proprietary machine learning algorithms across a vast consortium of data, we are able to stop fraudsters in real time. As our customer base grows, our solution becomes more powerful and our industry-leading fraud detection rates will continue to improve. We are excited to use this financing to grow quickly and expand our offerings".
Emailage customers have already benefited from faster approval rates for 60 percent of transactions and improved pinpointing of the the most risky transactions with an average hit rate of 25 percent. Some customers are detecting 50 percent or more of their total fraud just by analyzing risk based on the email. Having this information available in real time not only prevents fraudulent transactions from occurring but also helps recognize reputable new customers that may have been declined based on other criteria.
More information on how email scoring is able to help prevent fraud is available from the Emailage website.
Photo Credit: Balefire/Shutterstock