Recognize Trusted Visitors and Spot Cybercriminals: ThreatMetrix

“Digital identities for the mobile first world.”

For business, the mobile-first, digital world we live in offers enormous opportunity for new revenue and if done right, long-term consumer loyalty. Whether on their smartphone, tablet or other connected device, with each account sign-in, balance inquiry or mobile purchase, it’s a vote of confidence from end users that their digital identity is secure. But thanks to sophisticated and unseen cybercriminals, it can also be a pretty high-stakes game of chance for them – and you.

Thousands of times per day, digital fraudsters exploit undetected security loopholes in even the most well thought out security infrastructures. In fact, cybercrime is the number one threat to business today, costing more than $400 billion in losses each year. The most successful cybercriminals take advantage of speed and distance – finding security loopholes and moving quickly to exploit them globally. At ThreatMetrix(R), The Digital Identity Network(R) we help business fight back through the
power of global shared intelligence.

Candid Q&A with the Key Executive, Reed Taussig

What is the biggest challenge facing your customers?
Today, every business with an online presence is a global business and has to answer the fundamental question inherent in any online interaction…can I trust the person on the other end of the transaction? However, in an online world replete with cyber threats, authenticating potential customers and site users is no small matter. Too many controls designed to prevent fraud cause legitimate site users too much friction, who will either take their business elsewhere or complain of too much friction in the user experience. Too few controls and fraud goes through the roof. That’s our customers’ top quandary and request… help me identify legitimate users and customers while also stopping bad actors.

Tell us how ThreatMetrix solves this problem.
We have mapped the intricate associations between devices, credentials, locations and other related transactional attributes that form the digital identity of users interacting with our customers. Think of it this way, each of us has multiple virtual personas in the digital world… just look at the number of email accounts on your smartphone and the different ways you use them to interact with the online world. Mapping your digital personas into one digital identity and then providing a trust score to that identity is the key to online trust. We have done it by anonymously associating your device and attributes (how you interact with a site) to the amalgam of your digital personas (who you are), and then layer in how those personas are behaving in real-time across our global network. The key is tapping into global shared intelligence in real-time and in an anonymized way. By understanding your anonymized consumers’ complete digital identity and behavior across the global network, we can provide a global digital trust score that is unmatched.

What is the benefit to your customers?
We process over 2 billion monthly transactions from end user interactions across our global financial, ecommerce, media and social network customers. Derived from the over 30,000 websites we protect, our 4,500+ customers receive real-time global shared intelligence derived from across these important verticals. The result: a truly anonymized global digital trust score that encapsulates the identities of end users, irrespective of their geography and transaction type. When our customers are contemplating whether to accept an order from Beijing or a bank login request from Brazil, we provide the digital trust score and global shared intelligence to authenticate that end user.

In a nutshell, we are the largest anonymized, global real-time digital that provides our customers trust… the only online currency that matters.

How do you and your company contribute to the global IT platform and society at large?
Ultimately, ThreatMetrix differentiates good customers from bad actors, mitigating fraud and threat risk while not imposing any added friction on consumers and businesses. It’s actually quite revolutionary.

The ThreatMetrix business model includes crowdsourcing various data elements from across our network, moving those elements into a secure and encrypted environment, and delivering insights, scores, and attributes in real-time to drive customer decisions. The ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network is the foundation for Global Shared Intelligence – put another way, no one company can effectively fight cybercrime with just the customer data they have today – a networked model is the only scalable solution.

How we do this, is we uniquely establish and model the concept of a global digital identity at the consumer/user level. Next we crowdsource datapoints from our 4,500 customers to understand context across our network. Then we provide a decisioning environment where users establish policies, manage outcomes, and provide forensics and analytics for closed loop learning. With this model, customers contribute to the Network to create crowdsourced global digital identities. Our customers are at the center of making digital transactions around the world safer and more trusted.

Meet the Master

Reed Taussig, President and CEO: Reed leads ThreatMetrix with over 30 years of experience in executive management at high growth Silicon Valley companies. As founding CEO of Callidus Software, he led the company from a 5 person start up to a successful IPO with $70m revenue and 350 employees. He’s also held CEO positions at Vormetric, Inc. and Inquiry.com along with Board of Advisory roles at Xactly and Mitratech Corporation.

“We allow your trusted users to transact their business seamlessly and without friction.”