David Lotfi, Evina: “Telecoming is an incredible partner for us because we have developed a true two-way relationship”.

The digital ecosystem is growing: more users, more time, more investment. What does an antifraud system need to protect a digital business in this current environment?

This is an excellent question because too many companies are missing the first step in protecting their digital business: being aware that fraud is a significant part of their customer complaints problems! Without this awareness, it is impossible to provide a relevant answer. Then you have to remain serene. Fraud is a normal phenomenon that is not as serious as long as you are able to block it.

The real challenge is therefore to find the right expertise to protect yourself, knowing that you cannot improvise yourself as an anti-fraud specialist. It is a technical skill and for real results, you have to turn to the best experts.

And how do you find the best experts? Just look at who has fought fraud successfully. For example, on DCB, which markets are best protected? France and Belgium. Why is that? Because they are countries protected by Evina!

But expertise is not enough, you also need your anti-fraud expert to be 100% independent. Too many so called anti-fraud specialists belong to players who might have other interests than just to protect you the best way they can.

Advertisers are competing very hard in carrier billing, anti-fraud system access sensitive data, anti-fraud can block subscriptions. There should be no doubt among the players on why conversion is validated or not.

Another essential characteristic of an anti-fraud service is to understand the business issues of its clients. Indeed, a good protection service does not protect at the expense of income, on the contrary, it must be able to increase your turnover and profitability by opening up new perspectives of traffic with a better ROI and more efficient payment flows.

Europe lost in digital advertising fraud more than $2.5 billion in 2019, and this figure is estimated to increase by 19% y-o-y. Are companies really concern about this situation? What strategies have companies developed to fight this kind of fraud?

Everyone is aware of the problem of customer complaints and everyone realizes that the end user needs to be protected, but not everyone has the right diagnosis and does not realize that their customer complaints come from fraud. This is a huge problem!

Too many companies think, as in the early 2010’s, that the problem is mainly compliancy. Some become obsessed with purchase awareness, add extra steps, install OTPs, which only discourages the customer, limits conversion rates, and therefore everyone’s revenue. But times have changed, these compliancy issues no longer pose major problems in most cases.

The reality is that we have been facing an entirely new phenomenon of fraud explosion for the last 4 or 5 years. Faced with this fraud, too many players still do not have the right reflexes:

· If they’re a merchant, they’re only buying traffic where they think there’s not going to be fraud, from Facebook or Google. But since everyone buys from the same place, prices go up, which ruins them by lowering their ROI.

· If they are operators they only grant DCB to the biggest players such as Apple or Netflix. Not only does this impoverish the market by preventing the smaller players from benefiting from good payment flows, but it also weakens the operators who find themselves alone against American giants over which they have few negotiating levers.

In my opinion, there is only one good strategy, which allows you to protect yourself from fraud while continuing to grow your business: finding the right anti-fraud expert!

And it is the companies that have adopted this strategy that have done so spectacularly well.
I am thinking in particular of operators such as Bouygues and Proximus who have worked with Evina to both protect themselves and expand their activities. This is how they have brought their fraud rate below 1% while multiplying their revenue from DCB by 4.

It is a strategy that also works for merchants. We have several of our customers who have been able to unlock more efficient payment flows from their carriers thanks to Evina’s protection.

As an industry, we need to fight together against fraud on DCB. Telecoming and Evina are doing a great job to control the fraud impact on digital businesses, what do you highlight of this collaboration?

Telecoming is an incredible partner for us because we have developed a true two-way relationship. While we bring our anti-fraud expertise to Telecoming, Telecoming by its absolute exigency pushes us to constantly surpass ourselves.

We also share with Telecoming the same obsession with latency analysis and false positives, which are two of the biggest challenges in our business. It’s very pleasant to be perfectly on the same wavelength as your partner.

Moreover, Telecoming is always at the forefront of what is done on the market. Protecting them allows us to discover new types of fraud in advance, new ways of consuming, new services, etc.

Finally, Telecoming is a large international company that covers all kinds of uses in many countries where it enjoys an excellent image. Understanding its issues allows us to understand many new international markets. This is a crucial point for us but also for all the players involved in our business.

When an international carrier encounters problems in one country, it can take drastic measures for all the other countries where he is present. That’s why it is important to protect not only some countries, but all the major countries. This is a kind of herd immunity that Evina is working on. To accomplish this mission, Telecoming is an essential partner.