Fintech & Financial Services: fighting fraud without friction

Fraudsters follow the money. They target fintech and financial services applications as they offer easy access to large amounts of data and funds that can be illegally obtained. It’s absolutely essential that these organizations take the necessary steps to accurately protect their customers from online fraud and automated attacks.

Primary use cases fintech and financial services need to defend against:

• New account fraud, or fake account creation
• Account takeover, typically through credential stuffing
• API abuse and API scraping
• Application distributed denial of service (DDoS)
• CAPTCHA bypass and other solver services
• Payment fraud, including carding and cracking
• Web recon, exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities

Fighting fraud is no small feat, but with the right technology, it can be done without compromising customer experience.

Robust bot mitigation solutions are key to helping these organizations fight fraud and protect their customers’ accounts and data.

Here are some of the main reasons:

Payment fraud prevention - Fintech companies are at risk of payment fraud through account takeover attacks, which can result in chargebacks, unauthorized transactions, and other types of fraudulent activity. Bot mitigation solutions can detect and prevent these types of attacks, protecting the business and its customers from financial loss.

Protecting customer data - Fintech companies handle sensitive customer data, such as banking information and personal identification, which can be targeted by bots for theft or manipulation. Bot mitigation solutions can prevent bots from accessing this data and safeguarding the privacy and security of the customers.

Improving website and mobile app performance - Bots can slow down website performance by creating fake accounts, scraping data, and other malicious activities. Bot mitigation solutions can improve website performance by detecting and blocking bots, ensuring that legitimate users can access services and resources without delay.

Optimizing conversions - CAPTCHAs cause website and transaction abandonment. Certain anti-bot services avoid the use of CAPTCHAs and any visible challenges to provide a frictionless experience that never impedes the UX.

System integrity - Application vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits such as Log4j are exploited through malicious website scanners. Detecting such scans before application updates or patches are made available reduces the exposure to such events during the initial scan-to-exploit phase.

Bottom line: bot mitigation is critical to protect data and financial resources – all while providing a trustworthy, secure, and seamless user experience for customers.

Most security solutions can’t rapidly adapt to evolving automated threats and fraud. Two primary reasons for this:

1. They weren’t designed for flexibility and scale.
2. They rely solely on AI which needs to learn in order to act.

Unlike most anti-fraud tools, Kasada remains effective over time with dynamic client-side detection and strong obfuscation that protect against reverse engineering. This provides protection that is both immediate and enduring as opposed to traditional solutions where efficacy inevitably wades after deployment.

One of Kasada’s customers, a large fintech company, was experiencing new account fraud and high chargebacks due to a combination of fake account creation and account takeover (ATO) attacks. This imposed enormous costs. Their prior solution and use of CAPTCHA was ineffective and caused end-user friction. They needed an alternative to improve ROI and reputational damage.

With Kasada, this fintech company:

• Achieved a 4% increase in conversion rates by eliminating CAPTCHA and implementing Kasada’s invisible defenses.
• Increased page response time by eliminating fake account creation and account takeover attacks.
• Eliminated automated fraud that spiked to 120K requests per hour, ultimately saving hundreds of thousands per month in fraud costs.