UK’s second-largest pure-play online retailer is upgrading fraud protection across its leading brands websites

FICO, the predictive analytics and decision management software company, today announced that Shop Direct, the UK’s second-largest pure-play online retailer, has had great success fighting multiple types of credit fraud using FICO technology and FICO analytics. The FICO fraud solution provides Shop Direct with further protection against first-party and third-party credit fraud, including application fraud.

Shop Direct’s enterprise fraud management solution, built using the FICO^® Decision Management Suite, monitors every online purchase on the group’s retail sites, Very.co.uk, Littlewoods.com and VeryExclusive.co.uk. Customers have several options for making online purchases, including interest-free credit and instalment payments. The FICO solution scores each transaction in real time, comparing multiple facets of the transaction against the customer’s profile to detect unusual patterns. The solution also scores new applications for credit. Shop Direct’s fraud team can then define review rates, policy rules and flash fraud rules using FICO^® Blaze Advisor^® decision rules management system.

“As the UK’s second-largest pure-play online retailer, we’re protecting not only our revenues and our customers but also our brands,” said Neil Chandler, Shop Direct’s CEO for Financial Services. “We have a very successful partnership with FICO for fraud protection, customer management and decision optimisation. FICO analytics and tools are exactly what we need to protect our customers.

“We have been running the new FICO solution for more than 18 months and the performance over this time period has been consistently impressive. By adding FICO tools to our existing armoury of internal and external fraud tools, we are detecting in excess of 95 percent of fraud cases at a review rate of only 3 percent.”

“We’ve developed a custom solution for Shop Direct that is state-of-the-art for retail fraud protection,” noted Steve Hadaway, FICO managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “Shop Direct is known as an innovator throughout Europe, and we’re proud to help them offer their growing customer base a safe, value-added online shopping experience.”

FICO was cited as a leader in enterprise fraud management by independent research firm Forrester in its report The Forrester Wave(TM): Enterprise Fraud Management, Q1 2016. The FICO^® Falcon^® Platform protects 2.6+ billion payment cards worldwide.