This seems like a necessary component of any "effective acquiring bank"[1] because of where the liability falls. In the event of fraud, Stripe can get hosed and they need to protect themselves.
I imagine they wouldn't have taken the step of lowering their payout delay from 7 days to 2 days unless they were confident in their fraud detection abilities.
Can you elaborate on what about WePays fraud protection is better? Am I dead wrong?
Note: in no way affiliated with Stripe, just once considered starting something in this industry.
[1] I'm defining Stripe and WePay as "effective acquiring banks." I guess you can call them ISO's too. They're positioned somewhere in the web of words - but bottom line is that their the ones that find merchants that need to process cards.
The value proposition of WePay Clear isn't entirely captured in TechCrunch's choice of a headline, though they certainly have sensationalized it by drawing a Stripe comparison.
Yes, WePay Clear takes on fraud responsibility & shields the platform. (as does Stripe Connect)
However, WePay Clear does this in a whitelabel fashion, so that sellers on platforms do not need to create a WePay account.
In other words, it's not just fraud protection or whitelabel - it's whitelabel payments AND fraud protection.
Our launch partner in this is Freshbooks. Freshbooks currently offers several payment gateways/merchant accounts as an option to sellers like Authorize.net and Stripe. But their new primary "Freshbooks Payments" offering is built on WePay Clear. You can check out the experience here: http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2014/10/01/introducing-paymen...
Is there anything about the fraud protection that's particularly noteworthy?
I thought Stripe Marketplaces addresses this use case, but perhaps the liability still falls on me (the developer) with Marketplaces?
Yeah, for sure. We (Stripe) power many commerce platforms today[1], so we've been able to accumulate a decent amount of training data. It's probably also worth pointing out that our functionality for platforms like these protects the platform from risk losses, and has from the start. But, more competition is good for users, and congrats to WePay on the launch.
[1] Twitter, Facebook, Wave Accounting, Shopify, BigCommerce, Freshbooks, GoDaddy, Wufoo, and more.
Example: Crowdfunding Campaign. I start a campaign, charge a bunch of stolen cards, pull the money out, and disappear.
WePay uses a wide variety of machine learning, anomaly detection, social risk (through our proprietary Veda Risk Engine), and transaction analysis to stop fraudulent transactions from occurring on our partner platforms.
Bill - could you please explain some of the fine print? Are all chargebacks covered? Do you provide the ability to select which countries to accept payments from? Thanks so much!
One important item to note - WePay Clear is built for platforms - services that connect buyers and sellers like online marketplaces, crowdfunding sites & SMB commerce tools. We shield them from fraud losses by underwriting the merchants directly, and taking the losses ourselves when we're wrong.
It is not built for standalone e-commerce merchants to protect them from fraud. We are exploring this for the future, however - you can imagine that a seller using one of our platform partners need protecting too.
You can accept payments from anywhere, as long as it's a Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover. Sellers must be based in the U.S. or Canada, though expanding the scope of this is our #1 company priority.
When you offer this fraud guarantee for e-commerce sites, I'll be your first customer.
The merchant bank is the one that gets hosed due to fraud, so anti fraud technology helps Stripe, Paypal, WePay, etc. WePay is marketing that they are very good at not screwing themselves.
There are clients that care about anti-fraud, such as ecommerce companies that ship high value electronics, but WePay has no experience in this category.
The crowd funding space has fraud issues as it is a method for turning stolen cards into cash, but reversing a pledge is a lot easier than un-shipping an xbox.
WePay specializes in two-sided applications-where you have buyers and sellers and you're moving money between them. There's a lot more to fraud than a bad credit card. See my other post RE: fraud.
Makes sense.
After about ten minutes I can say that it's better than Stripe's, but marginally.
I'm in the middle of writing a detailed post on my findings and will comment back when complete :)
Re: Stripe Marketplaces, yes - that's my understanding based on my conversations with our customers.
With the Transfers API, the marketplace just ACHs funds from their Stripe account to the vendor's bank account, so the Marketplace has to handle all the liability.