Q&A: A new partnership to combat fraud 

Payments provider PayNearMe recently announced a partnership with Accertify to prevent gaming fraud. PayNearMe Chief Product Officer John Minor sat down to discuss the significance of the new relationship to its operators. 

PayNearMe recently entered into a partnership with Accertify, a subsidiary of American Express. What can you tell us about the new deal? 

PayNearMe, as noted, partnered with Accertify. The main goal was to enhance our fraud prevention and reduce our fraud losses for online sports betting and iGaming operators. We also have our eye towards the future, also assisting with the partnership to increase acceptance rates. So a lot about reducing fraud and risk, but there’s also a part in here about how we can in the future help increase acceptance rates.  

So what we’ve been able to do is leverage Accertify, which was when we talked to the market as a partner and leader in the field of fraud. A lot of the operators we were talking to thought about how we can work together with them to bring an all-encompassing platform to market, to help them with their journey – notably, as we talked about reducing fraud and delivering a better player experience.  

How will this new partnership make iGaming and sports betting transactions more secure? 

There are various places we can look at stats out there. But most recently Sports Business Journal had 15% of online gaming industries’ gross revenues as lost to fraudulent sign-ups. And the FTC estimates that the gaming industry is seeing 30% year-over-year risk and growing fraud.  

So, for us, if you’re in place for the MoneyLine platform where we’re assisting multiple payment types – we’re pulling together multiple payment types. Whether it’s deposit and payout, the ability to add a really powerful source like Accertify allows us to help our operators and downstream player account management systems ensures that fraud and risk is reduced within their platforms overall. At the end of the day, that really helps them focus their attention on the player’s experience. 

I know you don’t want to give away all the secrets, but can you tell us a little bit about how the technology works?  

Sure! From a perspective of the PayNearMe platform, there are events that occur along the journey of a player. The most common scenario, on the deposit side, is that I’m about to deposit money into a cashier. At that period of time, there are lots of different parameters and things you can look at to determine – is this behavior correct and what action do we want to take from here? So, on our platform, we have the ability to evaluate such events and then we can reach out to Accertify, given their plethora of network data, behavioral data, machine-learning models and some other things that we’re looking at together in the future. We then make the determination of ‘does this look like correct behavior? AKA’ Then to just be able to decide from there a yes/no and even build in a maybe, which I’ll talk about in a second.  

So, for us, it’s leveraging these variable data points, using the input we have in our platform, leveraging the power of Accertify and their network, what they’re able to bring, and help the operator make real-time decisions to hopefully help them reduce their operating costs across the board. I mentioned the yes, no or maybe with the integration that we built here and with the MoneyLine platform. Our operator partners have asked us to make it so that good actors are able to go through and not be any friction between the process. And those are sometimes easier to spot. But there’s a gray area sometimes where not all players’ behaviors are the same.

If you’re configuring a system to have rules and/or something human-based, it tends to treat all players the same. Our operator partners have asked us, if you can’t make a determination, give us workflow tools so we can then manually review it. Ideally, send as many as you can through, we don’t want any involvement. For those, though, that are in the middle, let us decide. So we’ve also built that in to give them optionality there, all with the goal here of automating as much of it as we can.  

That’s really cool, you’ve got a lot of flexibility, but then also a lot of turnkey processes as well.  

Absolutely. Operators, as they grow and they’re looking to platforms such as MoneyLine, they’re looking for the ability to know that across the board we’re taking care of the things that are driving the most value for them. That involves consumer experience, ensuring that they continue to acquire consumers and not preventing anything in the way to discourage good players; and at the same time ensuring that costs aren’t rising and they know we have their back.   

What has the reaction been like since you announced the partnership?  

It’s been very positive. We work closely with our clients across multiple industries. But for us, listening to our clients, understanding their problems and how we can help solve them is key. We knew the excitement prior to the announcement because we’ve been working with those partners and they guided us here, right? So, it’s been fantastic. We’re in what we traditionally call an early release, pilot phase, to ensure everything is working as we intend it to – and so far, all sides are really excited.  

Just to conclude, what’s next for PayNearMe in 2024? Can you give us a little tease for what you’ve got planned for the rest of the year? 

As a money-movement platform, we’re always looking at other payment types. So we have some exciting payment rails later this year that we’ll be adding to our platform. On the risk and fraud side, we’re also evaluating and looking into how we can automate the dispute-handling process. You can’t catch everything and when things do occur you want to be able to automate and remove operational overhead that operators have today. So we’re spending time there.  

Then, we just announced our Smart Switch technology, which we’re really excited about and gives our operating partners the ability to know that PayNearMe has got redundant card processing connectivity and we’re taking care of all that on their behalf. We’re excited about that and excited about other things we’re working on, and in 2024 we’re evaluating a bunch of AI use cases – that is for sure what we’re doing as well.   

Sarah Chen

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