Fraud and abuse are constantly evolving — and we’ve spent the year delivering new features and enhancements designed to keep you ahead. With 2018 nearly behind us, let’s recap some the highlights and what they mean for you.

Stopping spam and scams before they happen

Bad content damages site integrity, brand reputation, and user experiences. In March, we released an upgraded solution for Content Abuse to help you mitigate fraudulent and malicious user-generated content. We take a holistic approach, looking at content itself and the behavior of users posting content. This means you can identify and remove bad content before your community sees it — and before your reputation takes a hit.

While automation is one part of the equation, we’re also committed to building a best-in-class moderation tool. With updates to the Sift Console, you can now see the full context behind content including images, comments, and reviews alongside all the other signals we track. Sift puts critical information at your fingertips, so your moderation is more efficient and better-informed. Best of all, every decision you make improves the detection of bad content the next time it’s posted on your site — that’s the power of machine learning.

Learn more about Sift Content Abuse.

Make data-driven decisions with built-in reporting

Fraud-fighting success is about more than just chargeback rate. Launched in October, Sift Insights is a new suite of dashboards and reports built into the Sift Console the provides full visibility into the fraud you face and decisions you make. Since launch, fraud teams have traded downloaded data and complicated spreadsheets for Insights reports that are:

• Comprehensive – A complete view across time, payment gateways, and data sources
• Real-time – Data that’s always up-to-date, so you can quickly answer questions about your customers and team
• Flexible – Exportable reports for deep analysis or sharing across teams

As a fraud manager, Sift Insights dashboards help you easily see how your team is tracking against KPIs and make real-time adjustments to stay on course. When you need to dig deeper, detailed reporting on key business metrics, analyst performance, and the effectiveness of business logic reveal exactly how your efforts are helping to grow your business and reduce fraud.

Jump into Sift Insights now — or watch our recent product webinar to learn more.

Streamline review of tough cases

Manual review is a team effort, and analysts often need input from a teammate or manager approval to resolve difficult cases. Now with Escalation Queues, it’s easier to get another set of eyes on users or orders that require more careful review. Analysts can push difficult cases to an Escalation Queue to quickly get them in front of a manager or more senior analyst. This ensures they don’t slip through the cracks and are resolved as quickly as possible.

For tough cases that require deeper investigation, the Activity Log in the Sift Console provides total transparency into users and their activity. This year, we released enhancements to the Activity Log that give you an even fuller picture: all-time visibility into every page a user has viewed, every action they’ve taken on your site, changes in their Sift Score, and decisions made by your fraud team. With so much data at your disposal, we also added new ways to filter user data — so you can zoom in on certain types of events, jump to specific dates, and get the context you need to make informed decisions.

Read about more recent Console updates.

Integrations optimized for developers, by developers

Knowing developer time is scarce, we want to help you win the resources you need to make your integration successful. We released several new tools this year that empower you to make the case for how sending us additional data will impact your results with Sift — and clear, developer-first documentation designed to help make the most of their time:

• Data Quality Reports — See what data you currently send to Sift, what changes we recommend, and track your progress as you begin implementing improvements.
• Enhanced Integration Health Dashboard — Stay on top of your data with real-time reporting on the volume of data you send, your error rate, and warnings when data is problematic or not processed correctly.
• Redesigned API Reference — Updated documentation features new nav and is more searchable, for better developer experiences and faster integrations.

Take a look at our new API documentation.

2018 was a big year for Sift. From these product updates to our Series D funding round and new awards, we’re proud of what we accomplished. But there are even more exciting updates on tap for 2019 — some of which are already in the hands of beta customers. Stay tuned!