Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Lastly, what about the e-commerce sector where you said you just started offering services?

Alexandre Cagnoni: It happens to everybody all the time. I was recently on a trip to Indonesia. My card was refused when checking into the hotel and it was locked. It was identified by the system as a potential fraud. It was me using it. At the same time, I went to Best Buy. After 15 minutes, I was out of the store. I received a call from the credit card company saying, “We’re calling just to make sure that you’re the one doing the transaction.” I confirmed but if it was somebody else, the products would have been stolen already.

What we started to work on was a way to validate online if you’re doing a transaction using your debit or credit card. If you’re trying to buy something through Amazon or through any other website and the card issuer has any doubt about the legitimacy of the use of the card, we would send a message to the phone. You receive a push message saying, “Are you trying to buy this product at Best Buy at this moment?” You can confirm or reject. If you reject, the transaction is declined. If it’s you, you approve and continue using your card. It’s a way to validate online the transaction that you’re making with your credit card.

A lot of the cards are now coming in with chips and I saw some articles that the fraud is starting to migrate from physical presence to card-not-present purchases or online transactions. We see this as a big trend. We are providing solutions to avoid those types of attacks as well.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Given all the things that you see around you in the fraud detection space, whom would you consider as your top competitors as a company in general? Whom do you see in deals?

Alexandre Cagnoni: There are companies that have traditionally been in this market such as VASCO. It’s a company that has been in the market for some time. We are more focused on the mobile and the application itself, while VASCO is more focused on harder tokens. We see companies that have been acquiring other companies to gain more momentum in this market like Gemalto. Depending on the deal, you would even see some local companies. Each country has a local company developing something similar. So sometimes you compete with local companies. Those would be the two major competitors at this moment.

Sramana Mitra: Are you selling in Asia as well?

Alexandre Cagnoni: Right now, our main markets are Brazil and Asia. We have a small sales engineering team in Singapore that deals with the Southeast Asia region. We are a channel-based company, so we already have channels in countries like Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and some other countries. Those are the main markets that we are in right now. This year, we are building up a sales team in the US.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni
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