Ata Gokuldiram: There's actually a $200 billion sort of money on the table that's been left by retailers. Software should be able to say yes. No, you're really trying to use a big sledgehammer to nail in a very delicate nail.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of e commerce. Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High and an E commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game. And of course, keep your custom Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello there and welcome to episode nine of the Add to Cart podcast. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and strategist at e Commerce consultancy 12th High. In today's episode, we discuss e commerce fraud. We dive into the most common types of fraud. We look at how to manage fraud while not denying legitimate customers, and we understand how to automate fraud detection to optimize the customer experience and improve fraud accuracy. Joining me today is Ata Gokuldiram, who is the Vice president for Forta in Australia and New Zealand. Forter is a tool which helps e commerce merchants detect and protect fraudulent transactions. What I loved about my conversation with Ata is that he's a retailer at heart and understands the importance of sales. He shares some really powerful insights around how to protect your business without leaving money on the table for being overly cautious. Not what you'd normally expect, right? He shares some of the secret sauce behind how Forda not only responds to fraudulent activity, aims to get ahead of it. Now, this episode was recorded before the effects of COVID 19 hit our shores. So please keep this in mind that we are speaking BC time before COVID Everything still remains relevant. In fact, even more so given the uptake we have seen in E commerce recently. Also, one exciting announcement before we get in is that Klarna have come on board as an Add to Cart partner. We really look forward to sharing more about Klarna and we thank them alongside our inaugural partners, Shopify plus, for helping us keep this podcast going. Now, thanks to our partners, Shopify plus and Klarna, let's dive into our exploration of e commerce fraud detection with Atak O. Kildiram from Forta.
Nathan Bush: All right, welcome Ado. Thank you for joining us on Add to Cart.
Ata Gokuldiram: Well, thank you for having me.
Nathan Bush: Pleasure. Now tell us a little bit about Forta and what you guys do for e commerce merchants.
Ata Gokuldiram: Sure. So Forta is a leading technology that is enabling retailers to actually process more transactions. And at the same Time have the fraud component, the chargeback fraud or any other fraud associated with the E commerce journey to be able to facilitate that trade, have the fraud taken care of. It's an end to end solution. The decision is made in real time. So there's a real nice consumer use case for it. And what we like to do is make sure that the merchant itself is not compromised in terms of what it wants to do.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. And I know it's something that keeps E commerce retailers and retailers in general up at night, especially as it does evolve. And we often find that the black hats get a lot ahead of the white hats. And we often need partners like yourself to keep us honest and keep us up to top the game. What are the most common methods of fraud that you see?
Ata Gokuldiram: Sure, what we see in fraud. And just a little bit before that, I'd like to sort of touch upon how good the fraudsters are. You mentioned the white hats and the black hats. Look, the technology has come down in terms of the hardware costs. It's quite easy to sort of have the hardware capabilities. At the same time, data is compromised all the time. There's probably a data breach nearly every second day that you read about in the papers. So there's plenty of data to get. At the same time the dark web facilitates, you know, the, the, the, the trading of credit cards and credit card numbers. And you know, some of them actually come with a credit card with a guarantee that they're going to work the stolen credit cards. So you've got that. At the same time you've got a nice collusion with actual fraudsters. They actually is a badge of honor to say, hey listen, we've been able to compromise a certain site and share that information. And at the same time you've got a full range of sophisticated fraudsters that actually use automation, use bots to actually, you know, sort of do this at scale. And so the frauds are quite a sophisticated animal. They're not, they're not sort of people that are just doing it as a, as a bit of a hobby when they come home at night. They're actually doing it as a business. Like you and I have businesses to run. These guys have got their own KPIs. So you're dealing with the quite a sophisticated people. And at the same time you've got retailers who have to satisfy consumers who now want instantaneous decisions. They want it in real time, they want to be, have an account based solution. And so really the consumers are very unforgiving. If you don't provide Them with the service, the level of that Amazon effect or that Uber effect, if you don't give that service to your customer, they just go elsewhere. So that's the dilemma. And the interesting thing about the lifetime value of a customer on the online space is actually a lot higher than in a physical store because physical stores move, you might move. But you know, when you're, when you're on online lifetime value customer, you could be anywhere around the world. You could move countries, you can, you can move suburbs. But if you're affiliated to a certain brand, you're going to buy that regardless. So this is, this is where this big dilemma is the sort of the sophisticated fraud, the high demand consumer, the lifetime value which is the prize in the middle and everyone's trying to get a piece of that. So the approach is really about having a sophisticated holistic approach to fraud and not just to be sort of on the defensive.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that was one of the things
Nathan Bush: that surprised me when I saw yourself on a panel at one of the power retail events a few weeks ago is one of the quotes that stood out to me was don't actually go full defensive on this stuff. You've got to be smart. Because at the end of the day this huge prize for you in E commerce, if you go full defensive then you're actually losing more than what you're protecting.
Ata Gokuldiram: Absolutely. So statistically, you know, we see that the E commerce sort of fraud problem is about a $15 billion problem worldwide. Then you've got the additional $5 billion worth of money spent on fraud tools like sort of that defense mechanism. But the actual loss in false positives that is declining genuine customers for different fraud rules and different interpretations means that you know that there's actually a $200 billion sort of money on the table that's been left by retailers declining customers. And I think we've all been there. I've tried to buy things when I'm overseas, when I travel and I might be in a Singapore airport lounge buying something for my daughter who happens to living in London using my Australian credit card. And you know, that looks like a very suspicious transaction, but really it's actually sort of a propensity consumed customer looking to buy an expensive gift and gets rejected. So what do I do? I'll probably never go visit that site ever again and go somewhere which is much easier for me to transact.
Nathan Bush: So it's a double edged sword. You're losing that immediate transaction where a customer's ready to go as well as future customer as well.
Ata Gokuldiram: Absolutely. And if you look at the sort of, the dilemma of the marketing team, the marketing team are always working out new ways of attracting new customers onto the website. And we already have a huge problem with card abandonment because just like impulse buying, you know, in the old days, you used to walk past the window of a store, have a look, the shop assistant was helpful. You might actually get into the change rooms and actually maybe try it on. Then you'll have your doubts and you'll, maybe I'll buy it, maybe I won't. And this is exactly what happens in the, in the sort of the checkout page. You go in, you get excited, you then look at it and you might go, oh, the shipping's a bit too much, I'll leave it. And then, you know, and all of that sort of very interesting sort of psychologies at play. And then you've got the marketing people sort of drumming in new business and suddenly the fraud tool goes, hey, this is a new guy. We don't know Ada, we don't know Nathan, we're going to block him. There goes all that hard work, all that money that you spent with Facebook, with Google and whatever else you've used to actually drive that customer into your website. So it's actually quite an expensive task to actually knock back legitimate customers.
Nathan Bush: Shopify wants to let business owners know that they are with you. Business owners are at the heart of Shopify. As such, they have announced the first wave of support, including introducing local delivery and sidewalk pickup options, gift cards to be available across all plans and customers, extending 14 day trials to 90 day trials, community support via the COVID 19 forum and live weekly webinars to help guide you. This is just the first wave of support and Shopify will continue to monitor and update merchants. And as new developments are announced. Visit shopify.com covid19 to stay up to date with how Shopify is helping you, their merchants.
Nathan Bush: So you think retailers should be thinking more around the money they're leaving on the table through the fraud that they're knocking back. That's not legitimate fraud than the fraud that's actually through the door, Correct?
Ata Gokuldiram: Yeah, absolutely. And look, and again look, if you look at the history behind this is that only five, 10 years ago, retailer had a small percentage of their sales online. So for them, what was the big fish? The big fish was making sure that their conversions in store were great. They had the right inventory, the rates, the right sales stuff, et cetera, et cetera. The E commerce part was quite small. And what they would do is they'd Use sort of quite old technology or old fraud rules where they'd say, listen, any purchase over $400, I'm going to review. If someone buys something of the same SKU twice in the 1/2 hour, block them. I'm not going to sell to certain countries in Eastern Europe or I'm not going to sell to certain countries in Southeast Asia. I'm not even, I know Australian retailers. I'm not even going to sell into New Zealand. I've had problems with New Zealand. I'm not going to sell to.
Nathan Bush: Haven't we all had problems with New Zealand?
Ata Gokuldiram: Absolutely. Especially in cricket. And then, you know, then you've got this whole dilemma about okay, so what about looking at postal addresses and resellers? Like, you know, there are sort of a lot of legitimate resellers, but if you've got blanket fraud rules, blocking resellers, blocking university related addresses, et cetera, et cetera, you know, you're just cutting out a lot of the market and not having a holistic view. You're, you're really trying to use a big sledgehammer to nail in a very delicate nail into, onto the wall. So it becomes quite problematic. And that's where we see the holistic approach of looking at fraud for the sort of the end to end customer journey and getting a full picture of the, of the consumer rather than this big bang rule. You know, like another classic rule is vpn. Now I use a VPN only because I want to watch American hbo. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a fraudster wanting to hide my identity. And these are all the things that sort of like, you know, like little touch points that people in the fraud departments have different rules. You could actually, you could have one retailer selling the exact same thing as a competitor and they'll have totally different rules.
Nathan Bush: Yep. And it can become pretty complicated pretty quickly, can't it? If you've got someone in charge of adding, manually adding rules into a system like that and all of a sudden you add all these things exactly what you said. VPNs, locations, number of attempts, the points can add up pretty quickly to create a false positive through a number of different things without even knowing that you've added all these rules together.
Ata Gokuldiram: And I just got to say something to our friends in the fraud department. Their job, their KPI is fraud. Right. So I can understand them saying that I want to, you know, reduce fraud and you know, like, like it's behavioral analysis in terms of you see a bad behavior, you, you, you shut that down. What you're doing, though, is you're shutting everyone in that region down if you've had a problem with a certain country. And so there's not much finesse in that approach.
Nathan Bush: All right, so let's explore how we minimize those false positives then. From your point of view, is it technology led or is it people led in reducing the amount of false positives?
Ata Gokuldiram: It's a combination. So really, in terms of what Fortra is doing is actually using technology, in terms of identity based technology, to understand the behavior of what a consumer looks like in terms of an actor, an actor who's acting like a consumer, and then adding in the analytical work that we do in modeling to understand how that person fits in within a certain vertical and really getting that into play. And then the third component, which is really important actually is actually becoming sort of like a very significant feature, is that our network in Forta, we're sort of covering close to $150 billion worth of transactions. So it's $150 billion worth of transactions in a yearly basis, which is a very big number. There's a lot of transactions, so we get to see a lot of players. And from that we're actually able to also link other people that aren't related in our soft linking approach. And so we get this enormous network effect. And all of our partners, our customers, end up having the benefit of learning. If we have a fraudulent activity on one site, that learning will be transferred over so that the whole network gets that benefit. And this is again where really when fraud departments are working, they're working in isolation. If you've got a major electrical retailer here and another one across the road, they're never going to share data and certainly not going to share data on fraud. And so what happens is that you only know the fraud that happens on your website. And what we're able to do is actually use that network effect. We do that in a way that sort of doesn't affect anyone's privacy. We just. Because again, we're looking more about the behavior rather than anything else.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. So that network effect, is that based on historical data, as in I tried to get a fraudulent transaction through with this retailer, therefore that card, don't let some other retailer take that card on as well. Or is there AI built into that as well to predict what might become fraudulent?
Ata Gokuldiram: Definitely. So back to what we do. We have a JavaScript on our website and on our merchants website. So from there we're collecting close to 6,000 data points. And those data points are giving us A good idea in real time about the consumer. So is this person buying an expensive watch? Are they looking at the returns policy? Are they right handed and left handed consistently through the journey? Are they actually typing in the credit card details or are they using the tab function? Are they using an emulator? Are they pretending that they're using an iPhone, but they're actually using a desktop because they're happy to punch out, become very efficient in their spreadsheet, in testing a whole lot of numbers. So we're getting all these pictures, we're getting that on a sort of a macro level and then looking at it deep down in terms of the verticals, understanding that at the same time, what we're also doing is we're really understanding the consumer journey. The consumer journey. Just have a look at the holiday purchase. It's a miserable day in Melbourne today. Could be on the train going into work and I might be looking for a cheap deal in Bali. Now that journey might start on my mobile telephone at lunchtime. I might look at it on my desktop by the evening time I put the kids to bed, watched half a season of something and before I've just gone to bed, I've actually made the purchase. Now, our technology can link all three devices. If you were looking at it on the last checkout, I've only spent two minutes buying a $4,000 trip to Bali. Right. But actually it's not the case. If you look at the whole life of that whole transaction, it might have been a 12, 13 minute sort of journey, which again, we sort of able to sort of link that up to get a full picture of the customer.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes sense. And it's a much more holistic way of looking at it than a transaction.
Ata Gokuldiram: Exactly. And then, you know, you mentioned about black lists and white lists. Again, if you look at, look at what a blacklist is, it's actually almost past history. Now if you. That's great that you. In a blacklist, you've got a stolen credit card. But that's already old news. That fraud is going to use a new credit card. Yeah. So like it's great, everyone has these blacklists, but like it's really, it's blacklisting. Very old news. It's sort of not really doing much for. But, but what it's doing is actually just creating a lot more false positives, you know? Yeah.
Nathan Bush: I'm sure those, those fraudsters aren't holding on to those blacklisted credit cards going, oh, gee, I wish I could still use this.
Ata Gokuldiram: Yeah, yeah. And we get lots of retailers, go, listen, we've got all these big, big history. We've been around 10 years, we've got all these black, you know, blacklist. Okay, great. You know, we'll, we'll look at it. You know, we feed that into our machine anyway, so we actually getting that sort of transactional understanding because we're training our models all the time in terms of, you know, a good customer, bad customer. So we actually need that information. But going forward there's no need for any, any lists.
Nathan Bush: That makes sense. Can I go back to what you said about left handed and right handed customers? Yeah. How do you work out how if someone's left handed or right handed.
Ata Gokuldiram: Okay, okay. So it's really not about the workings of a person being left handed or left handed. What we're looking for is inconsistencies. So it's got to do with the speed of how you're, how fast you're typing and making sure that this person was sort of typing at this sort of speed and then not at the next speed. And that's sort of like a change of pattern. And it's really, you know, like our logo has a fingerprint as part of our logo with the, for the OEs. And that's really what we're trying to do is just get a really nice identity of the person and having a look at it as a holistic sort of journey.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, no, that makes sense from an outside point of view. I'm not a fraud expert by any means, but I keep up to date with what's happening and who's getting caught out. It feels to me globally and in Australia, that a lot of the fraud, the big fraud that we see coming out, whether that be credit card details or whether that be leaking customer details, a lot of the fraud is actually from just sloppiness at a record keeping or access to data level. How much of that do you see verse actually really sophisticated criminals.
Ata Gokuldiram: So there's a couple of types of fraud. You know when you've got the sort of, the phishing type of fraud where that's elective active campaign where fraudsters are actually sort of actively seeking out a company and trying to get some information or individuals on bank details, everything else. So that's like one part of the problem which I think Australia's had a fair bit of experience with that, you know, but you might get a utility to pretend that they're like a telco and, and they'll reset the passwords, whatever. So that's one definite level of problem. The other, other, other thing is, you know, you know, like this data breaches all the time. And again, that comes at a company level. They're sort of like, that's a big, big solution in terms of making sure that data isn't compromised. And then the third thing is, yes, regular housekeeping. Everyone is very tired of different passwords all the time. You know, credit cards. You know, it's like everyone gives out the credit card all the time. You're paying people all the time. You're on the phone giving out your credit card details. It's, it's just how we transact these days. I mean, you know, the days of going the bank and getting a cash withdrawal and making a purchase. So look, you know, the sloppy record keeping, I think, is probably the least of our problems. I think that it's more the sort of, the macro, macro breaches, the macro sort of conservative efforts to compromise data is really the problem. Of course, changing your password, making sure that no one knows your PIN number and all that kind of, all those sort of good practices are good at an individual level. And I think that, you know, we try to do that.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And what about team training? What do you see when you assume when a lot of retailers are putting in forta or other software to minimize fraud, that there's a level of team training that goes along with that? What are the key things that you think you need to bring your team up to speed on when it comes to detecting fraud?
Ata Gokuldiram: It's definitely a collaborative approach. Even though we give a decision of approval decline and that might feel like there's a bit of a black box sort of decisioning that we do. We have a portal. In our portal, there's visibility and transparency over every decision we make. And as we make those decisions, we're able to show our merchants why we're doing those. So why do we decline them? Why did we not decline them? And so we give it a full transparency. And I like to say our dashboard is almost like the first week, week of driving in a driverless car. You want to be close to the steering wheel just in case, until you get comfortable. And then you're able to sort of let go and read the newspaper, which is our experience, you know, that initially, you know, the, the fraud guys want to get into the dashboard and have a look at it every minute, every day. By the end of it, it's great. You guys are under control. We know it, and we benchmark ourselves. So, you know, because we really only are at sort of that enterprise level, our Performance is monitored all the time. And you know, our decline rates, our approval rates are very important to our customers. So. And they need to see that they have that visibility.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, because I was recently working with a large retailer here in Australia and one of their main goals of putting in new fraud detection was purely to minimize that middle ground. Where it was, it was flagged as for manual, manual decision making. So that fraud tool there, that went, yeah, that's good, no, that's bad. But it was this middle ground that was the really bad one where they went, we're not confident enough in the tool that we've got to make a decision for us. We need someone to go in there and check it. But especially around promotional periods, those can add up really quickly and then add to the time that a customer will receive their order. So the goal for them was just to cut that middle piece out and have full confidence in the software to make that decision for them.
Ata Gokuldiram: I think we're in 2020, you know, software should be able to say yes, no, approve or decline. You know, we're confident, we're not confident. And this is, this is, this is the sort of, the third generation sort of decision. As a service, we don't have time. I mean, even a score, what does a score mean? What does a seven mean? What does a six mean? You know, different people have different, you know, I see a movie, it's a six, you might see a movie, it's doesn't really mean anything. And it's the same thing with a fraud because it depends on your level or aperture type for fraud and it depends on what margin as a retailer you've got. Because if you've got high margin in your goods, you don't mind a bit of fraud because it's worth the big sale. Right. If you're in like, let's say if you're selling airline tickets or if you're selling movie tickets, you've got very thin weight of thin margin. So you kind of have that fraud. So again, it's a little bit unfair of the sort of not being able to get an answer. You need an answer and that's what we provide the pe also for scalability. It just doesn't work because you know, really what's happening also in retail is that in my old retail days it was like Christmas, bit of Easter and the beginning of school holidays and ending of school holidays where you have these sort of like physical peaks of retail trade. Now you can actually coordinate an event, a promotion, a sale and you could have like a Huge traffic through your website. There's coordinated Cyber Mondays, Cyber Fridays, et cetera, et cetera. Clickfrency here in Australia, that, that provide a substantial volume and again, having a pending, having a non. A commitment to a decision is only making you sort of like, sort of be part of that, sort of the bottom end of the retail spectrum. Yeah, I mean if you look at it, you know, in retail most of the logistics is now being automated. A lot of the, the. The of marketing has been automated really. The retailers have transformed their business in terms of getting this automation and optimizing the whole infrastructure, their operational efficiencies. And fraud is probably the last little bit that for some reason has been holding on to this manual review process. And I understand the reasons, if you look at the history behind that, that is that it was a Treasury function. The people that actually control the bank account, the cfo, the sort of the VP of Finance was controlling that fraud bit and then they would get a fraud person because they got busy and said, hey look, you look after fraud, I'll look after the accounts. And so that part of that business is sort of internal and over time we're seeing it more and more sort of replacing manual reviewers to give that sort of complete, fully automated solution.
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Nathan Bush: we've got payment providers like Afterpay as well coming into the market and saying, actually we'll cover you for this. If we let one through, it's on us, you don't have to worry about it. So we're kind of going through that transition where retailers are still responsible for majority of transactions, but fraud protection is actually becoming something of real value for payment providers to differentiate themselves as well.
Ata Gokuldiram: So yeah, so a couple of things, you know, especially in Australia with we've got some very strong operators in the Buy now pay later space which you know, in some retailers it could be 30% of their business is taken, you know, in that area, which is great because you know, like a wonderful innovation industry in retailing, which is a great success story. That, that part. Yes, correct. The fraud is on them. What if fraudsters do less line of resistance? They might end up having a shift of fraudsters coming back onto their sites, not using to pay or any of the buy now pay laters. And the other thing that one might discuss is that maybe that there's a lot of false positives in what they're doing and again not giving that right sort of consumer sort of experience that needs to be. So yes, definitely a consideration and I think that definitely worthwhile thinking about the actual true cost of fraud, the true cost of fraud protection with those buy now payload.
Nathan Bush: And I think it's a really good point there that you make is that even though we think we're protected there, if the fraud says no, we're protected there, they'll just go somewhere else and look.
Ata Gokuldiram: This actually leads me again to another important thing about fraud is that the e commerce journey used to just end and start with fraud on a chargeback basis. So but now there's different ways of monetizing that journey journey. If you look at coupon abuse returns abuse, loyalty abuse, account takeover, wherever there's an actual gap in the e commerce journey, the fraudsters will actually, you know, take advantage of that. So you know, like retailers, they're competing, they have generous returns policy but at what, what stage that become an abuse of the policy? Like you know, buying, you know, I don't know X amount in a year, that's fantastic. But if you're returning 10 times as much, is that really worth it to you? You end up with like, you know, great, great Christmas sales, great sales during the sales period. But then you get all the red, red dresses back that you didn't want to get back and then you can't sell them. So again it's, again, you have to, you have to weigh that sort of journey. Again we, we see that with coupon abuse. The marketing department want to, want to encourage couple sort of coupons or referrals. But what happens is you, you'll have like little micro cosmos of people trying to micro sort of units trying to take advantage of that and set up 10, 20, 30 accounts and take advantage of those coupons and then you'll get see those coupons traded elsewhere. Again, not really great for the brand. You might be happy with two or three dummy accounts, but not 20.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Ata Gokuldiram: And then the other thing is, you know, you've got, you know, the buyer, seller collusion on marketplaces and all these things that really aren't healthy and give it sort of an inaccurate picture of what a retailer should be doing.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes sense. There are so many more avenues than just the payment. Right. For fraud. I read there was. Loyalty is one of the highest growing avenues for fraud purely because the amount of revenue that we're holding in those loyalty systems right through built up points and rewards. So it makes sense.
Ata Gokuldiram: So I'm probably going to get in trouble with my market but I know that, that it's double digits and it's sort of like very high and, and it's growing because really it's become a, a commodity, it's a currency. And again, anywhere where you've actually got a mixture of points and cash, anywhere where you can actually redeem points for not just for travel but for toasters or other goods or electric goods, that becomes a currency that becomes, you know, a worthwhile place to exploit the retail. Yep.
Nathan Bush: We'll put a link to that research in the show notes so people can access it later if they want.
Ata Gokuldiram: Great. Check my facts.
Nathan Bush: Check my own facts as well. Well, that's great. One last question around the fraud from an Australian E commerce point of view. Normally we go into what retailers are doing it well, but I don't think that's a wise, wise idea to be doing on this podcast. Is there any sectors of E commerce in Australia, whether that's travel or fashion or other ways that you think really have their finger on the pulse around fraud and not leaving money on the table?
Ata Gokuldiram: Okay, so look, I think given Australia's unfortunate sort of last three or four months has been terrible for retail. You know, you've had the sort of the bushfires, you've had the flood, you've now had this virus and basically on the backdrop of actually weak economic activity as well. So it hasn't been fun for retailers. And so I think that to their credit a lot of retailers are embracing technology and understanding that this is actually a move, a good move forward in terms of operational efficiency, lowering their sort of costs, in terms of manual review costs. But one sector that I do see ahead of the curve is really the travel sector. The travel sector. And that's a function probably again, like I was talking before, in terms of margin. Margin, they have low margin, highly competitive. So they've got to be really on their game. And that's really what, what we see they're probably the, the leaders in understanding fraud and the, the sophistication of the fraudsters. But now more and more people like, you know, in the delivery, you know, food delivery business now go, wow, we're getting a lot of fraud hike in. We need instantaneous decisioning. Again, probably the sort of, the ones that are a little bit, sort of just a bit maybe caught up in other things in terms of just relevance or in terms of, you know, having the right sort of product is probably the fashion retailers. They're probably, they're probably in a process where at the moment we see a lot of them actually re platforming, changing payment gateway ways, looking at different processes. They're the, probably the ones that are sort of like, you know, the ones that we see as the big potential moving forward, but they're also looking at other markets. See in Australia we actually have a very tiny market and everyone's recognized that, hey, listen, why can't we sell our nice clothing, our nice products overseas? And one of the reasons why they've actually held back is because of fraud. Because when you go into a new neighborhood, you don't know what the right streets are. You don't know what's going, you don't have the data. And again, that sort of restricts what they're doing. So we're actually helping a lot of fashion retailers move into America, moving to different markets and basically do exactly the great job that they're doing online here in Australia, adding in the US marketing the US sort of sort of product lines and actually making a really good go.
Nathan Bush: That's a really good point. And it's about that collective intelligence, right? It's about how do you bring that collective intelligence globally, not just in your own backyard.
Ata Gokuldiram: Exactly, exactly. Because look, you know, look, retail is tough. It's not, it's not, it's really serious. And you know, spent the day talking to, about. That's what I do all day is speak to retailers and there's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of like supply challenges right now. There's a lot of demand challenges. You know, there's been a whole shift in, you know, people just, just like basically consuming. There's a definite sea change in, you know, people are questioning why they're buying things, how they're buying it, where is it made, is it sustainable? Is this good for the, the environment? So there's a, a lot of things happening all in this very short space. There's actually a lot of information to digest.
Nathan Bush: Yep, it's very exciting. But I just want to thank you very much for sharing. It was fantastic. And what I really love about your approach is that you're. You're coming from a retailer's experience as well. So you know how important it is to get that money through the till and to balance that with fraud. It's just not a scare game. Right. It's a. Let's be sensible and realistic about this and do what we can.
Ata Gokuldiram: Yeah. Look, I've been with Forza for nearly four years. If it was all about scaring people about fraud, I probably couldn't last. I want to be able to facilitate extra sales. That's what I like to do.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. Now, I've got five quick questions that we've. We've started asking our podcast guesses quick fire questions. I'm going to fire them at you. Give us what comes to your mind first. All right, question one. What is the weirdest thing you've ever bought online?
Ata Gokuldiram: Wow. This is what I bought online. I don't know. I can't. I actually can't. Can I come back to you while my brain's ticking, please?
Nathan Bush: This is why you read the questions before. All right.
Ata Gokuldiram: Okay.
Nathan Bush: Question question number two. Who is your favorite retailer?
Ata Gokuldiram: My favorite retailer for sure is a company called James Purse in America.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful.
Ata Gokuldiram: But any reason why I love their online experience. I like their relevance. I like that it's nice and simple and basic. It just sort of works for me as I mature.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful.
Ata Gokuldiram: Cool.
Nathan Bush: Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our readers or our listeners should immediately get into?
Ata Gokuldiram: Look who moved my cheese.
Nathan Bush: Ah, nice.
Ata Gokuldiram: Yeah, I read, I read that nearly every six months because things change, you know, like in terms of our business. Business from when I started to where it is now. I see that everywhere. Where even with my kids. I tell my kids, like, one studying commerce and the other one studying data science, and they probably chop and change degrees so many times. And I go, listen, just get used to it. Because we're just in this sort of fast paced environment that adapting to change is very important.
Nathan Bush: It's awesome. And it's a book that applies to anyone, I think, no matter where you are in life. I remember my nan actually introduced me to that book back when I was, like, still in high school. So it's a fantastic.
Ata Gokuldiram: It's a business book, it's a life book, It's a relationship book. It's a great book.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, agree and finish this sentence. The future of retail is challenging. Nice. Very nice. Thank you very much, Ash. I really appreciate your time and what you've shared.
Ata Gokuldiram: Thank you Nathan. Thank you very much.
Nathan Bush: Take care.
Ata Gokuldiram: All the best guys. Take care.
Nathan Bush: Mind blown. If we just leave behind that little left hand and right hand fraud detection for the moment and talk about those figures that Atta shared at the start. Fraud is a $15 billion e commerce problem. It's significant. But false positives from fraud is actually a 200 billion dollar problem. That's a hell of a lot of money left on the table. So here's an activity. Pull up your last three months of chargebacks. Do you have any? If so, what percentage of sales are they? If there are no chargebacks or the percentage is very low, ask yourself, are you being too defensive? Are your rules too tight to the point where you are denying legitimate customers at the most critical point? Continue tweaking those rules.
Nathan Bush: Now.
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