Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta (Part 2)

Tracy Metzger: Whether it’s mobile carriers when they’re doing prepaid businesses where credit card acceptance immediately fulfills minutes to a phone, or digital goods companies like e-ticketing, or software downloads,  all these things have an after-market value. Those companies spend anywhere from 14% to 20% of their total SGNA on managing fraud. It’s a huge amount of cost.

One of the other by-products is it hurts the acceptance. This is because these internal operational departments, while doing their best through tools and technologies, tend to be risk-averse. They may sometimes take the caution on the air of not accepting a transaction because it may look risky, which creates a user experience issue. You have acceptance issues that create revenue offset problems. You have operational issues that create expense issues.

What we do is help offset the operating expense by outsourcing and we’re motivated by increasing acceptance. Let’s talk about our technology a little bit as well. Vesta only gets paid when we accept transactions. We’re highly motivated to increase acceptance as a result of that. Those are the three use cases where we help companies through our products and services.

Sramana Mitra: What do you do in those scenarios?

Tracy Metzger: Let’s take a couple of key industry trends. What we do is we operate a machine learning leveraged risk management system and we focus a lot on information security. I’ll break those down into two different thought points. Let’s first talk about information security which is one of the biggest challenges in the payments and financial technology industry.

We help companies offset their compliance obligations which is a pain point for just about anybody who accepts credit cards around the world. It’s highly expensive to maintain that compliance. It’s something that’s ongoing. There’re constant challenges of data breaches that happen around the world. We hear about them all the time through companies that are highly reputed. Every time there’s a compromise, it always changes the scope of compliance and increases compliance issues. There’s always additional work that has to be done.

We offset a lot of that through our products and services – through transparent redirects of shopping carts and technologies that we embed within people’s e-commerce solutions. We offer an easy-to-use SKD in many of the popular development languages. These help minimize companies’ exposure to data breach or other information security needs. Additionally, on the machine learning platform, we leverage 22 years of risk decision data of hundreds of different elements of historical information that we keep on file. That’s really the secret sauce that Vesta has.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta
1 2 3 4