Liberating the world from transactional fraud – interview with Outseer

‘Stop fraud before it happens and know that every transaction is as real as the happy customer behind it.’

The payment authentication and monitoring solutions company Outseer announced in April 2022 the appointment of John Filby as CEO, following the retirement of Reed Taussig, Outseer’s former CEO. In his new role, Filby will lead Outseer’s mission to liberate the world from transactional fraud and build on the company’s heritage of innovation. Today, we speak with John, to find out what this new role means to him and learn how we can combat financial crimes in a dynamic threat landscape.

John, for a brief introduction, tell us a bit about yourself. What experiences have led you to be Outseer’s CEO, and how do they tie into the company’s objectives?
I am thrilled to have joined Outseer, which is now part of my 20+ year history in fintech, focusing on digital payments, risk management, and data analytics. This has included serving as President, Risk & Compliance at Fiserv and as a Board member at Abrigo – both Fiserv and Abrigo provided market leading solutions that help prevent financial crimes. All are very relevant experiences considering Outseer’s longstanding anti-fraud mission.

Now, focusing on Outseer’s aim to help card-issuing banks, payment processors, and merchants solve their payment fraud challenges. Could you emphasize some of these key challenges plaguing the financial services businesses? What keeps their executive up at night?
We are seeing a rapidly expanding fraud attack surface in the global market due in part to ever increasing digital transactions which have of course been accelerated by the pandemic. It is not just the overall volume of digital transactions and interactions driving the attack surface but also the dispersion of that volume across so many new payment types involving so many different players from P2P to Buy Now, Pay Later, to faster payments to crypto payments. Each creates new points of attack for fraudsters. History tells that as fraud is blocked in the ecosystem, it tends to migrate to weaker links in the chain – so clearly the more links in the chain, the more room there is for fraud migration and new fraud schemes.

What can be done to secure financial institutions and merchants’ mobile and online channels? How does Outseer solution and vision align with this?
The good news is that fraud prevention techniques and solutions are evolving and advancing. Beyond keeping up on the latest developments in the threat landscape, when it comes to combating fraud there is no replacement for utilising an intelligent platform that monitors and detects fraud in real time, using great science fed by the right set of data sources and risk signals for the right use case at the right time. This is what we provide at Outseer. A platform that marries technology, science, and data to interrogate high volume event streams and render highly accurate risk decisions in sub-seconds. The result is industry leading fraud detection rates with industry low false positive rates. That is how we deliver on our brand promise to stop fraud not customers. As the digital transaction landscape evolves and new payment types and use cases arise, we can tune our platform and ingest new data signals to keep pace.

You have been steering Outseer for just over a month. How has your experience been so far and what do you aim to achieve over the next 12 months?
It has been a very warm welcome for me here at Outseer and I see real passion for our mission across our global team. We have the privilege of being a trusted partner to hundreds of customers around the globe, including some of the most recognised brands in the world. I am looking forward to getting out and meeting more of our customers, especially now that we are seeing a cautious return to in-person meetings. We enjoy a proud heritage of innovation, and we will continue to engage with the market and listen to our customers to ensure we are meeting their fraud needs of today and tomorrow, with a focus on frictionless customer experience.

About John Filby
Throughout his 25-year career in the fintech industry, John has transformed businesses of all sizes for growth, ranging from startups to mid-market to global Fortune 500 companies. His career experiences include serving as President of the Risk & Compliance Division at Fiserv and bringing an award-winning suite of transactional risk products to the global market.

About Outseer

Outseer, an RSA company, empowers the digital economy to grow by authenticating billions of transactions annually. Our payment and account monitoring solutions increase revenue and reduce customer friction for card issuing banks, payment processors, and merchants worldwide. Leveraging 20 billion annual transactions from 6,000 global institutions contributing to the Outseer Global Data Network, our identity-based science delivers the highest fraud detection rates and lowest customer intervention in the industry. See what others can’t at outseer.com.