December 2024 Summaries

Buy Now, Pay Later services are projected to fund $18.5 billion in holiday purchases, reflecting growing consumer demand for flexible, often low- or no-interest payment options, particularly among Millennials and Gen Z. As providers expand, they must balance rapid customer approvals and merchant growth against fraud and payment-default risks, including first-party fraud committed using legitimate identities. One BNPL provider partnered with Socure to improve onboarding verification and fraud detection, reporting a 22% reduction in overall fraud losses, $9 million in savings, a 19% reduction in losses tied to payment defaults, and a 38% decrease in fraud investigations. Socure’s first-party fraud consortium also identified risk signals across institutions, including prior account closures associated with some first-payment defaults, enabling the provider to reduce losses while increasing approvals and improving onboarding for legitimate customers.

A promotional case study describes how an investment platform with more than 700,000 unreviewed politically exposed person (PEP) screening alerts used Socure’s watchlist solution to reduce apparent false positives by 98%, shrinking its review workload from an estimated 28,000 consultant hours and more than $1 million to 571 hours and roughly $28,000. It presents PEP screening as a high-stakes compliance challenge because institutions must identify individuals with prominent public functions while avoiding resource-intensive false matches. Socure attributes the reported results to a two-stage identity-matching process, AI-based analysis that links variations in names and identities while learning from prior results, and configurable risk controls for differing watchlists, thresholds, and customer categories. The account also claims that the platform improved detection of genuine risks, accelerated customer onboarding, increased analyst productivity, and gave management better visibility into compliance exposure.