Elena Popova

I need some help - Anyone in payments has likely ran into the "what do you do" question from friends and family, and some of the time just saying "Oh - I am in Payments" is good enough. For when it isn't good enough, we may go into CX, auth rate optimization, Fraud prevention, etc etc. I had a conversation with 3 family members this month and we somehow ended up on the topic of account updater... To me, account updater is a solid solution solving an interesting problem. To them, their first responses were "That doesn't seem fair", "Is that even Legal?" and "What if I got a new card because I didn't want to get charged anymore?" They're looking at it from the buyer's perspective, not the supplier / merchant side. Anyone else run in to this before? And does anyone actually have an answer I can bring back to them for our 4th of July get together? #payments #accountupdater #tokenization

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Winning chargebacks isn’t a matter of luck. It’s a strategic process that ⚡GenAI agents can help automate Chargebacks are the bane of every merchant’s existence. If it costs $400 to process a chargeback, it’s often simpler to write off the fraud loss than manage the dispute. As most of you know chargeback is when a bank forcibly reverses a credit or debit card charge. This crucial consumer protection can be abused for fraud. The foundation of any automation, is having a great process as a foundation, for example: 👉 Make sure your policies are clear. One of the best ways to reduce a chargeback is to help a customer self-serve in the event something has genuinely gone wrong. (e.g. Sending return labels with items, or giving customers a portal to submit photos before returning them). 👉 Predict fraudulent behavior. Gather as many passive signals before the transaction as possible, like user device history behavior, transactions, and the reputation of their device. In compelling evidence 3.0, citing the re-use of a device can help win a dispute. 👉Organize and gather compelling evidence like device_id and its fingerprint. If you’re going to make a dispute via your PSP to a payment network, make sure you have the right evidence in place. It’s that last point that can be especially time consuming. One way to speed that up is with automation. ⚡ That’s hard because the data often sits in unstructured human readable documents and has to fit a highly bespoke format. It involves a lot of copy + pasting and editing. Having lived this. We decided to automate it with GenAI. ⚡ Our chargeback agent will gather the compelling evidence, and submit it to your PSP on your behalf. Our job is to make your job easier. #fraud #chargebacks #disputes

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🛒 Disrupting the Norm: Trustly’s CEO Talks Future of Payments 🛒 Trustly CEO Alex Gonthier is no stranger to shaking things up in the payments world. From the early days at iPIN/Valista to the forefront of open banking at Trustly, Gonthier’s ideas have long influenced major players like J.P. Morgan and Stripe. Today, he’s steering Trustly through a landscape where they handled a cool $60 billion last year, eyeing $100 billion this year. That’s not just growth; that’s making waves! 🌍 Open Banking Unleashed: The upcoming Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations could set the stage for a big leap in open banking in the U.S., promising a playground where Trustly’s model could thrive. Think less about fees and more about seamless, evergreen accounts that make paying bills and shopping online a breeze. 🚀 Diverse Applications Across Industries: From your phone bill to your next bet on the Super Bowl, pay-by-bank is finding its groove. Trustly is tapping into markets where traditional credit cards fear to tread, offering a cheaper, slicker way to handle money. 🛍️ E-Commerce: The Final Frontier: Cracking e-commerce with pay-by-bank is tough, with credit cards holding the fort with those juicy rewards. Gonthier’s game plan? Matching those perks without breaking the bank for merchants. They’re already winning in travel and healthcare, proving there's room to grow. 🔮 Looking Ahead with a Rebel Streak: Gonthier’s not just running a company; he’s on a mission to challenge the status quo. With every transaction, Trustly is paving the way for a world where paying by bank could be as common as swiping a credit card. So, what’s next? If Trustly’s track record is any indicator, it’s more innovation, more growth, and maybe, just maybe, a future where checking out with your bank account becomes the coolest way to pay. #Fintech #OpenBanking #DigitalPayments #BankingInnovation #FinancialServices #PaymentSolutions #Ecommerce #TechTrends #FinancialTechnology #Trustly https://lnkd.in/dTSmpmQw

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Capital One, Adyen and Stripe partnering to fight Fraud. Does this mean they're serious about Discover being a network? Capital One has made its Direct Data Share API available to Adyen and Stripe. If Capital One sees fraud at a Stripe merchant and the same IP address appears at an Adyen merchant, it could block that transaction. The API also helps prevent false declines because evidence of good customer history can be shared. 🧠 This move suggests Capital One could be serious about its Discover network. As Matthew Janiga noted, this isn’t a “the bank wins, you lose” game. It shows they’re serious about having partnerships with acquirers and merchants. 🧠 However. What’s not clear from the press is if this will go beyond Capital One. If this is only ever a Capital One API, it might benefit some customers and merchants, but it leaves a lot of opportunity on the table. 🧠 More fraud data sharing is good. Everyone talks about fraud data sharing, but very few are doing it. Today, your options in the US are Early Warning Services, a bank-owned and controlled consortium (with a high barrier to entry), or smaller emerging (but more open and inclusive) networks like Sonar* and Beacon. If you like these takes you can say thank you by heading to fintechbrainfood .com and hitting subscribe :) #fintech #fraud #banking #payments

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Over the next 10 years, payment processors with poor customer support will die. In the early days of payment processing, offering payment processing was the biggest problem to solve. Thanks to over a decade of innovation, this problem has been solved. There are now MULTIPLE providers in every payment processing category for platforms to choose from. Great customer support is no longer a nice to have, it's a key market differentiator. The best part about offering great customer support as a payment processor? It's really not that hard to do. All of the systems, tools, and tech to offer great customer support already exist. The only thing that needs to be added to the equation is a customer-centric product team! Would love to hear other's thoughts on this. Do you agree?

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Tomorrow! Join our webinar to learn how card issuers and merchants can collaborate to reduce card declines

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𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐖𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫 Why settle for less when you can maximize your rewards and cashback with WalletWarrior? Our cutting-edge mobile app is designed to turn every purchase into a smart investment. Imagine effortlessly tracking your spending, optimizing your credit rewards, and getting the most out of every dollar you spend—all from the palm of your hand. Don’t let your hard-earned money go to waste. Download WalletWarrior today and start making your money work for you because you deserve a financial ally who’s as dynamic and proactive as you are. 𝐖𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫 - 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐔𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐲. 𝑃.𝑆. 𝑊𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑡𝑎 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑃𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑠𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑔ℎ.   𝑊𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒, 𝑑𝑟𝑜𝑝 𝑎𝑛 𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑖𝑙 𝑡𝑜 𝑝𝑎𝑑𝑚𝑒𝑠ℎ.𝑝𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑦𝑎𝑑𝑜𝑚@𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑟.𝑐𝑜𝑚 

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Walmart's secret fintech weapon revealed ---------------------------------------------- Walmart's fintech startup One just launched its own BNPL offering, going head-to-head with Affirm. But here's the real story... Walmart is making a bold play to own the entire lending experience. By cutting out the middlemen, they'll have total control over the customer relationship, data, and profits. I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg. The infrastructure behind embedded lending has reached a tipping point. White-label platforms like Jifiti are making it drop-dead simple for retailers and banks to launch their own custom BNPL products in weeks, not years. Imagine the power of combining Walmart's scale with a fully branded BNPL experience, tailored to each customer's unique profile and shopping habits. It's like having your cake and eating it too - all the control of an in-house build with the speed of an off-the-shelf solution. Walmart's move is just the first domino. Who's next? 

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In an unusual move, Capital One is teaming up with Payment Giants (and rivals) Stripe and Amsterdam-based Adyen to offer a free product aimed at fraud reduction, the financial services giant told TechCrunch. While Capital One has built models to protect its customers from fraud, it was getting stuck because it just “didn’t have enough data,” said head of fraud strategy Jonathan Borman. So it built an open-source project, called Direct Data Share, which he described as an API that allows merchants or anyone in the payment stack to send real time transaction data. By partnering with Stripe and Adyen with Direct Data Share, Capital One can act like a data clearinghouse, identifying fraud across all of their rails. “If we see an IP address through Stripe that turns out to be fraudulent, we can now use that same IP address to prevent fraud for transactions happening at Adyen, and vice versa,” Borman told TechCrunch. But it should also mean fewer false declines, when a card or transaction is flagged but shouldn’t be. And merchants pay no extra fees for the protection. So far, Borman said that the partnering with the FinTechs has resulted in the approval of over a billion dollars worth of transactions that would have been declined. Read more in this exclusive article by Mary Ann Azevedo for more info: https://lnkd.in/exKQ8UfM Find this helpful? [ 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁 ] Anything to add about this subject? [ 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 ] Nice story, Marcel. Next! [ 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 ]

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In my recent conversations with merchants on LinkedIn, and other payment conferences, especially those processing over $300M, it’s clear that there are significant concerns about discrepancies in fees management especially under the IC++ model and the inefficiency of managing multiple merchant accounts. This highlights the need for an automated system with accurate benchmarks and effective comparison tools. 🔍 Fee Complexity: Fees include multiple components (Interchange, Scheme, Processor, Markup). Merchants control only the markup and face challenges with the rest. 📈 Constant Changes: Fees are constantly changing, making it difficult to stay updated. 😠 Billing Errors: PSPs/Acquirers often bill merchants incorrectly, such as charging different fees for the same card type or not crediting interchange fees for refunds. ☣ Lack of Transparency: There is a lack of transparency for "other" fees, such as excess retries or chargeback fees, which are not attributable on a per-transaction basis. 📊 Data Standardization: There is no standardization in how different acquirers present data—ranging from APIs to CSVs, monthly PDFs, or sometimes no data at all. Here are a few strategies merchants can use to manage this complexity: 1). Leverage Data: Establish a robust data infrastructure to capture all fees. Vendors like Inai (YC S21) specialize in aggregating fees across multiple PSPs. 2). Collaborate with PSPs/Acquirers: Work with your PSPs/acquirers to get granular fee details. 3). Track Anomalies: Systematically track fee anomalies and identify opportunities to reduce costs, such as stale authorizations or failing to use AVS, which can lead to interchange downgrades. What strategies have worked for you? Feel free to share your comments or DM to talk payments.

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My career in payments is now old enough to buy beer and one of things that was true twenty+ years ago and is still true today: most payment processors provide terrible support. This is especially true for payment processors that power embedded payments for software platforms. What most payment providers fail to realize is that the platform has put their own name, brand, and reputation on the payments product and any provider error or delay reflects poorly on the software platform. Every time a payment provider makes changes to a merchant or a payment or a deposit and doesn’t give the platform notice or the ability to relay that change... it feels like a breach of trust. Embedded payments isn’t just an API or a white-labeled portal, it also (should) include tools to equip the platform to serve their customers in real-time. A good embedded payments provider will give you webhooks to listen to status changes for all entities (merchants, payments, deposits, etc), penny-perfect deposit reports that include ALL the detail required to make the deposit make sense (payments, refunds, fees, etc.), and give you the ability to send custom metadata so users can quickly put these activities in context. No guessing, no surprises, and no waiting. It's your data, these are your merchants, and you need to know what’s happening right now. Not 48-72 business hours later when you receive an answer to your support email.

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Here's a great highlight for today -- fintech companies that are doing good things. Finance and good deeds are not mutually exclusive. These companies are both inspiring and innovative. Perfect for this Monday morning! #Fintech #FinanceTech #Growth

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How much fraud is hiding in a lender's credit losses? Like a snake in the grass 🐍 By the time you see it - it's too late. At Point Predictive we've conducted hundreds of data studies with different lenders and have found that early payment default is an extremely strong proxy for fraud. How strong you may ask? Frank McKenna joins me on this episode to discuss a recent retro study we completed. Our incredible Fraud team does a forensic investigation on a lender's early payment defaults just to see how many of them contain identifiable fraud flags at the time of application. In this study we found that 78% of their losses, categorized as credit losses, had some sort of material misrepresentation at the time of application. And the results of the types of fraud may shock you. Almost 4 out of 5 credit write-offs were actually fraud 😱 Most lenders focus all of their attention on #identityfraud...but this makes up a minority stake of the overall #fraudpie. The fraud breakdown was: 💸 46% Income Fraud 🏦 25% Employment Fraud 🥷 16% Identity Fraud (only 16%....) 👥 10% Straw Purchase 🚗 4% Powerbooking I like to say that fraud is preventable. There are red flags and trends to spot. The problem is you first have to understand that it exists. When a lender only focuses on identity they're missing the big picture. Although it is extremely important to know who you're doing business with, if this is your only priority you're going to keep losing a lot of money. #fraud #fraudprevention #fraudawareness #fraudstrategy #autofinance #ai

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When we founded Moov, we wanted to be a payments processor that would ‘delight end users.’ A little cheesy, I know. But that was our goal. Our first key questions to answer. Where could we find people who cared as much about the end consumer as we did and could reach them at scale? So we threw our value prop out into the world and discovered the incredible niche of Vertical SaaS providers. The entire point of Vertical SaaS providers is to make the lives of businesses easier so that they can provide the most seamless experience to their customers. They care an INSANE amount about the end user experience. We realized that if we could provide a developer-friendly payments platform, vertical SaaS providers would jump on it and make the lives of countless consumers infinitely easier. If you’re having trouble achieving your end goals, take a step back and think about whether you’re selling to the right person.

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Here is why selecting the right partner is the most crucial step for having a competitive edge in the industry. Hear from our valued client on how i2c has empowered them to say ahead of the curves.

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First-party fraud is a growing challenge in the world of payments, often misunderstood but highly impactful. Unlike third-party fraud, first-party fraud occurs when a legitimate cardholder makes a purchase but later disputes the charge with the intention of avoiding payment. This deceptive practice strains financial institutions, merchants, and even consumers through higher fees and tightened security measures. Key Market Insights: - 75 percent: Estimated percentage of card-not-present fraud claims that are the result of first-party fraud. - 28 billion USD: Anticipated losses due to first-party fraud on card-not-present transactions. - 337 million: Estimated global chargeback transaction volume by 2026. Source: Ethoca’s Chargeback Trends and Outlook, 2023. Mastercard’s Ethoca program, which includes the First-Party Trust initiative, is a powerful initiative aimed at tackling this issue. Ethoca fosters collaboration between issuers and merchants, providing real-time data that can help prevent fraudulent chargebacks before they escalate. By sharing insights and enhancing transparency, the program empowers businesses to mitigate fraud and improve customer relationships. Understanding the nuances of first-party fraud and leveraging solutions like Ethoca can make a significant difference in protecting revenue and maintaining trust in payment ecosystems. What are your thoughts on addressing first-party fraud? Are programs like Ethoca part of your current fraud prevention strategy? #acquiring #rapyd #ISO #PayFac

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Every fintech company reaches a point where regulatory compliance becomes a major hurdle. It’s a pivotal moment when they need a trusted partner who can embed itself in the company's operation and provide solutions and resources without delay. This isn’t just a theoretical challenge—it’s something we’ve seen firsthand over the past decade. Fintech companies operate in one of the most innovative industries, where speed and adaptability are critical. But as the industry pushes the boundaries of innovation, regulations are constantly shifting, and it can be difficult to find trusted expertise that understands both the technology and the compliance requirements. At InnReg, we bridge that gap. We understand the challenges they face because we work with some of the most innovative fintech companies every day. Whether they’re navigating complex regulatory frameworks or addressing unique use cases, our team provides tailored consulting and outsourcing solutions to meet their needs. This experience has taught us that every fintech company’s compliance journey is unique. Some need support scaling their operations while meeting regulatory expectations; others are tackling entirely new compliance challenges brought on by the most complex emerging technologies. Whatever the case, our goal is always the same: to help our clients stay ahead so they can focus on driving innovation and growing their businesses. The expertise we’ve developed over 10+ years of serving fintech clients has also led us to explore new ways of making compliance more efficient. As an example, we recently launched Regly, an AI-powered platform designed to complement the work we do at InnReg by streamlining compliance processes and fincrime detection. What challenges has your team faced when navigating compliance? I’d love to hear your experiences.

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🚨 Think Twice Before Using Quick Cash Services Like Oportun, Klarna, or Afterpay Need cash fast? It's tempting to use platforms like Oportun, Klarna, or Afterpay, but there are some important factors to consider before you dive in. Here’s why these might not be the best options: High Interest Rates: These services offer immediate access to funds, but often at a cost. The interest rates can be exceptionally high, leading to significant debt accumulation over time. Credit Score Impact: Using these quick cash options may seem like a simple solution, but they can have serious repercussions on your credit score. Mishandling these services or failing to meet repayment terms can damage your credit, making it harder to obtain loans in the future. Debt Cycle Risk: The ease of access to funds can encourage a cycle of borrowing that's difficult to break. What starts as a one-time solution can quickly turn into recurrent borrowing, trapping you in a cycle of debt. While these services promise convenience and immediate financial relief, the risks they pose to your long-term financial health are significant. It’s crucial to consider these factors and seek alternative, more sustainable financial solutions. 👉 Follow for more insights on managing your finances wisely and avoiding common financial traps. #FinancialAwareness #SmartSpending #DebtCycle #CreditHealth #ManageYourMoney

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