Overview of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection 2020 release wave 1

Today’s digitally transformed enterprises conduct significant portions of their business online and in real-time. For example, omnichannel customer engagement (seamless customer journey across mobile, web, and in-store portals) is revolutionizing the retail industry. Such innovations are driving higher revenue, reduced operating costs, and improved customer experience.

However, they are also exposing the enterprise to serious threats from those who attempt to take advantage of the online channel's relative anonymity and accessibility to commit fraud. In e-commerce, for example, people might attempt to use compromised accounts and stolen payment instruments to commit payment fraud. Similarly, fraudsters might abuse programs such as “buy online and return in-store” to commit returns or discounts fraud that leads to shrinkage losses for brick-and-mortar stores.

Fraudsters attempt other nefarious activities such as creating fake accounts to abuse free trials and new-customer freebies or post fake product reviews. They also try to compromise existing accounts to commit payment, warranty or refund fraud. All these examples of fraudulent activity impact not just an enterprise’s profitability but also its reputation. It is our mission to help digitally transformed enterprises fight fraud while keeping their doors open for genuine customers and partners.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection initially focused on payment fraud protection. It helped enable an e-commerce merchant to drive down fraud loss, increase bank acceptance rates to yield higher revenue, and improve the online shopping experience of its customers. In this release wave we are adding several new features to the product that enhance this capability:

• Extend and tailor ontology and rules: Enables merchants to bring custom data into the product by extending the data ontology of assessment events, and provides a richer rules capability to use that specialized data as well as the ML model score to achieve a more fine-grained control on real-time decision-making.

• Integration with Dynamics 365 Commerce: Enables Commerce customers to use Fraud Protection to protect their business via a low-code experience (since the product APIs come preintegrated out of the box).

• Expanded coverage for transaction acceptance booster: Increases the market coverage and enables merchants to boost the acceptance rate on more transactions in the United States and other countries and regions.

• Extended localization beyond English and French, to six additional languages.

Based on customer feedback, we are lighting up a new set of capabilities called Loss prevention that help brick-and-mortar retail store operations fight fraud and abuse. This will help retailers reduce shrinkage losses and improve store efficiencies.

• Provides actionable insights to help merchants stop retail losses by using artificial intelligence on historical transaction data to detect anomalies in business scenarios such as product returns and discounts.

• Enables the customer to take action on these insights.

While we had a basic account creation protection capability already available in the payment fraud protection product, we are significantly expanding the portfolio via a new set of capabilities called Account protection.

• Account protection leverages Fraud Protection’s proprietary risk assessment engine, artificial intelligence, as well as the Fraud Protection network to enable customers to make decisions and take proactive measures for events such as account creation, account sign-in, and other account activities.

• The customer can choose to block suspected fraudulent attempts or challenge them with two-factor authentication.

• It includes the ability to detect and prevent attempts by bots.

Loss prevention and Account protection will preview in March and will be generally available later in the year. A noteworthy aspect of Fraud Protection is that the capabilities of Payment fraud protection, Loss prevention, and Account protection all use a common framework of AI models, a shared customer knowledge graph including device fingerprinting data, and a common Fraud Protection network for global insights.

As a result, these applications work in tandem by sharing signals and insights. This synergy improves the fraud detection accuracy in all three capabilities. Moreover, the customer can see the connections of events across all three capabilities using the graph explorer. This gives the enterprise customer unparalleled visibility into all aspects of its customers’ journeys across omnichannel engagement.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection 2020 release wave 1