Sift in 2019: Looking Back on an Eventful Year

We had a busy 2019 here at Sift. From our rebrand to new integrations and product features, we’ve been hard at work innovating and working to make the internet a safer place for all. Here’s a recap of some of our biggest accomplishments of the year.

New year, new Sift: starting the year off with a rebrand

January was a time of fresh starts and name changes – we dropped the “Science” in “Sift Science” and officially rebranded to Sift. But it wasn’t just a matter of shortening our name and overhauling our site design. We introduced an innovative fraud-fighting methodology to the industry: Digital Trust & Safety, the alignment of fraud prevention and growth, to enable companies to grow without risk while creating positive customer experiences.

Digital-first, disruptive companies have embraced the Digital Trust & Safety mindset and are outpacing their competition. This year, we did research into whether e-commerce companies who adopt Digital Trust & Safety achieve higher revenues, and the results were clear: organizations that were practicing Digital Trust & Safety had some of the highest year-over-year growth rates of all e-commerce companies, whether they were young disruptors or mature powerhouses.

We’re empowering businesses to break free from traditional, obsolete, and rules-based fraud-prevention methods with the technology, community, and partnerships that power Digital Trust & Safety. And we’re continuing to tap into new applications and evolutions of this powerful new approach to proactively preventing fraud (keep reading to learn how we further expanded on Digital Trust & Safety in the fall of 2019!).

Partnerships for a stronger Sift

We forged strong partnerships this year with Ekata (formerly Whitepages Pro) and Dwolla, enriching all of our platforms with the power of integrations. In the Sift Console, users can query Ekata with a single click to see key user attributes of email, phone number, address, and IP, without having to navigate between windows. Having access to this data gives Sift customers greater visibility into user identity, making it easier than ever to review difficult cases quickly and confidently.

Dwolla introduced a Sift integration into their platform, enabling real-time ACH fraud prevention for their customers. This integration brings the power of the Digital Trust & Safety Suite to Dwolla users; they now benefit from Sift’s global network of 34,000 sites and apps to deliver unparalleled accuracy that proactively stops fraudulent behavior and helps businesses to streamline operations and drive revenue growth.

Do you want to partner with Sift in 2020 like Ekata and Dwolla? Reach out to us – we’d love to hear from you!

Turning the tide on the one-size-fits-all approach to fraud fighting with Dynamic Friction

For good users, online experiences shouldn’t feel like going through airport security, but legacy fraud-fighting solutions tend to apply friction in a blanket, indiscriminate way to all users, customers and fraudsters alike. This often leads to customer insult, user frustration, and churn, with trusted users abandoning a platform that continues to treat them the same as risky users.

Enter Dynamic Friction: the optimal application of friction to user journeys based on behavioral and situational attributes, to ensure fraud protection doesn’t result in customer insult. Dynamic Friction is powered by Digital Trust & Safety and considers the user journey holistically, from end to end; as a user moves through each stage of the journey, each interaction is evaluated for risk. If the level of potential risk hits a certain threshold, additional verification is applied, but if the interactions are deemed trustworthy then the verification is removed, giving the user a more streamlined, customized experience.

Dynamic Friction is a powerful tool in the fight against fraud, but it’s also essential for maintaining good relationships with and creating positive experiences for trusted users. Verification by Sift is a new feature that makes it easy to leverage Dynamic Friction, enabling businesses to introduce multi-factor authentication (MFA) into the user journey not as a blanket, mandatory authentication process every user experiences in the same way, but in a thoughtful, discriminate way.

Creating custom experiences based on risk is the future of effective fraud fighting – and the future is here.

Looking ahead to 2020

We’re looking forward to hitting the ground running in the new year and continuing to innovate in the name of stopping fraud and making the internet a safer place to be. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and subscribe to our blog to be the first to know about what’s new from Sift! We’ll see you in 2020!