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ATLANTA — Equifax Inc. on Wednesday launched two new fraud-prevention products—Signal Score for Email and Signal Score for Device—aimed at helping financial institutions, e-commerce merchants and telecommunications providers identify potentially fraudulent digital activity at the earliest stages of an online interaction.
The new tools are designed to produce real-time trust scores from an email address or the device used in a transaction. Equifax said the products are intended for use at high-risk customer entry points, including new-account applications, online checkout, login and password-reset workflows, and mobile ordering environments.
What the products do
Signal Score for Email evaluates an email address in real time, considering such factors as the account’s age, history and risk profile. Equifax says the score is intended to help a business determine whether the email identifier appears trustworthy before completing an application, account creation or transaction.
On its product site, Equifax says the email tool uses machine learning and more than 15 years of proprietary, first-party-sourced data to assess email-account age, historical reputation and recency. The company positions it as a way to detect synthetic-account farming, automated bot attacks, account takeover attempts and promotion abuse—risks that can originate before an account is fully established.
Signal Score for Device focuses on the computer or mobile device associated with a transaction. The product uses device details, location and network information to help validate the device’s relationship to the individual using it, according to the company.
Equifax said the device score combines device fingerprinting and session-level analysis to flag signals associated with location spoofing, anonymous networks, emulators, bot activity and multi-accounting schemes. It is also intended to help businesses recognize established customers across devices and sessions, potentially reducing unnecessary friction for lower-risk users.
A front-end fraud focus
The launch reflects the growing importance of preventing fraud at the “front door” of digital commerce and financial-services onboarding. Rather than waiting for a payment decline, chargeback, account takeover or other adverse event, the products are designed to give risk teams a decisioning signal when a consumer first interacts with a business.
“Businesses can no longer rely on static snapshots of customers to stop fraud,” Ajay Guru, senior vice president and general manager of Identity & Fraud Services at Equifax, said in the company’s announcement. “Leveraging our unique differentiated data, these new solutions are designed to deliver a trust score in real time, giving our customers a better view of a user and helping them to mitigate fraud more quickly.”
Equifax said the scores rely on its non-public, first-party-sourced data and identity-linkage capabilities to connect digital-session behavior with real-world consumer profiles. The company contrasted that approach with fraud tools that depend on static global networks or database files that may not reflect current activity.
Potential implications for collection operations
While the products are primarily marketed for fraud, acquisition and account-security use cases, the technology may also be relevant to creditors and collection organizations that rely on digital consumer engagement.
For example, a creditor could use email or device-based intelligence when a consumer opens a new account, changes contact information, requests a password reset or seeks access to an online self-service portal. Stronger validation at those touchpoints could help reduce account-takeover exposure and prevent fraudsters from redirecting communications or payment activity.
Equifax also says its broader Real-Time Identity Intelligence suite includes “Consumer Insights,” a non-FCRA offering that can be used to evaluate fraud risk, household spending power and repayment behavior. The company says the suite can support collection and refund prioritization, although organizations using these types of data will need to assess the applicable regulatory, privacy, data-governance and permissible-use requirements for their particular workflows.
For debt collectors and creditors, the distinction between fraud-prevention activity and consumer-reporting activity will be important. A score used to authenticate a consumer or detect anomalous account behavior may serve a different operational purpose from a score used in a credit, employment, insurance or other FCRA-covered decision. Organizations should evaluate product documentation, data flows, adverse-action implications where applicable, vendor controls and their own policies before deploying the tools.
Integration and deployment
Equifax said Signal Score for Email and Signal Score for Device can connect to existing fraud-prevention or case-management platforms through application programming interfaces. Businesses can deploy the two tools together or use one to address a specific intelligence gap, the company said.
That integration model could allow a business to insert risk signals into existing onboarding, authentication, fraud-review or account-servicing rules without replacing its current fraud stack. In practice, the value will depend on how an organization calibrates the scores: whether they trigger step-up authentication, manual review, transaction holds, enhanced monitoring or a streamlined experience for consumers deemed low risk.
Equifax’s announcement comes as digital fraud increasingly involves automated account creation, synthetic identities, credential abuse, device emulation and the masking of network location through VPNs and other anonymizing tools. The company said traditional fraud controls can struggle with such techniques because they may not provide enough visibility into the identity behind a device or digital identifier
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