Thus, with immediate, online transactions, the opportunity for fraudulent activity (i.e. the use of unauthorized credit cards to purchase gift cards) increases. In response to these security concerns, Tsai says Cardpool has devised a system to carefully monitor transactions and detect patterns.
Are there startups that provide this sort of fraud detection, the way Directed Edge does recommendations?
A company I worked for had a problem with chargebacks, so they now run the transactions by Actimize first, which will then give you a score of the likelihood it is a fraudulent charge. This gives a run down of how it works: http://www.actimize.com/index.aspx?page=solutionsfraudcard
If a small company wanted to compete with Actimize it would be difficult, since they have all of the historical data and, I believe, they can connect fraudulent accounts between merchants (e.g. amazon.com and paypal) so there is a network effect that creates a real barrier to entry.
AFAIK, every startup in the transaction business has had to build it themselves. I suspect it's hard to build without also running a transaction business, because you just wouldn't know what fraud patterns look like.
Are there startups that provide this sort of fraud detection, the way Directed Edge does recommendations?