Your Questions Answered on How to Help Prevent Fraud

During Market Pulse webinars, our audience submits questions each month to our expert panel. For our July Market Pulse webinar our panel included Equifax Risk Advisor Maria Urtubey, Scott Przybyla, Senior Vice President of Sales and Identity Fraud at Kount, an Equifax company, and Gaurav Mittal of Ethoca, a Mastercard company. Below are their answers to your pressing questions on consumer delinquency, synthetic fraud, and more.

Q: Going a bit deeper, how are you reducing alert rates, false positives and operational losses? How are these metrics different for different payment channels - card, checks, online payments, etc.?

Scott Przybyla: We recommend the use of a pre-authorization fraud prevention tool to reduce chargeback alerts, notifications, and disputes. Reducing risk pre-transaction can optimize authorization rates and reduce false positives.

Q: Do you have any data or best practices on synthetic fraud prevention in the car lending industry?

Scott Przybyla: According to Equifax Data and Analytics, within one year's time, 456,000 accounts were identified as potential synthetic identity fraud, which equates to an average of 4,000 accounts per major auto lender. This represents an average bad balance per account of $15,000, which translates to a potential loss of more than $768M to the auto industry.

Q: What about using Clear for fraud prevention?

Scott Przybyla: There are several competitive offerings in the market that provide fraud solutions. Equifax is uniquely positioned to provide end to end coverage of the customer journey, in various channels for a wide range of customers, globally. With unique data assets and capabilities from Equifax, Kount and Midigator, we are able to offer a complete solution to meet customer needs from account opening and identity proofing with AML checks to pre and post auth payments solutions. With solutions being delivered on the Kount 360 platform, unique data points are collected from each solution to power decisioning across the journey - a first in the market.

Q: Do you expect any consumer delinquency impact from student loans that will start reporting to the bureau at the end of September? Do you have any data on how many signed up for the fresh start program?

Maria Urtubey: We can't yet tell the extent of the student loan delinquency on overall consumer information, but we do know that historically, student loans have been relegated to the bottom in the payment hierarchy, irrespective of the reason behind falling into delinquency.

We cannot differentiate between different income driven repayment plans and/or other relief programs, such as fresh start; they will be reported in the same way and as a result, we cannot confirm the number of individuals that signed for fresh start.

*The opinions, estimates, and forecasts presented herein are for general information use only. This material is based upon information that we consider to be reliable, but we do not represent that it is accurate or complete. No person should consider distribution of this material as making any representation or warranty with respect to such material and should not rely upon it as such. Equifax does not assume any liability for any loss that may result from the reliance by any person upon any such information or opinions. Such information and opinions are subject to change without notice. The opinions, estimates, forecasts, and other views published herein represent the views of the presenters as of the date indicated and do not necessarily represent the views of Equifax or its management.

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