This is a hot topic lately.  Why?  Because there are a lot of cool tools on the market with slick sales teams telling you that it’s easy to manage chargebacks and fraud yourself.

But is it?

Recently I was reading a quote from KC Fox of Radical, an omnichannel payments platform company wherein he surmised that there’s more to fraud management than you think.

It’s not enough to hire a few experts to look at things, set up a solution and go. Because fraudsters’ strategies are constantly changing, so must merchants’ defenses, and that requires constant attention and upkeep. Whose job will it be to stay on top of that? At what point is it eating up too much of their time, costing the company in labor expenses? Plus, said Fox, a one-time solution reveals nothing about trends. Hiring a separate analyst to track those trends is another expense.

These are valid points.  Beyond that, I’d even go as far as to say that finding an expert these days is pretty difficult unless you are a large issuer or acquirer who may be training from the ground up.

One of our clients has learned the lessons of how difficult it can be to manage chargebacks and fraud on their own.  They are a large, international corporation with a small team (4 people) dedicated to fighting fraud.  Despite the use of great tools and certainly plenty of effort and enthusiasm, they failed to curb a climbing fraud rate.

When we stepped in, they were already in month three of VISA’s Chargeback and Fraud Monitoring Program.  Not a great place to be unless you enjoy getting fined.  But using our tools and allowing the data to ‘speak’, we dropped their fraud by 90 percent over a six month period.

The question I’d recommend you ask yourself is why would your team be more successful than this $400 million company?  If you don’t have a clear answer, consider an outsourcing option by a proven company.  Chances are you’ll save more than you’ll spend!