Last month, LegitScript, Marketplace Risk, and the Merchant Risk Council hosted Online Risk and Compliance Day, an industry-wide day of education and networking for professionals working in merchant risk & compliance and in trust & safety. This is a recap of Session Two, which included Julie Fergerson, CEO of Merchant Risk Council; CJ Schneller, Senior Vice President of Risk and Compliance at MerchantE; Julie Schwartz, Senior Compliance Leader of Network Compliance at FIS Global; and Billi Jo Wright, Chief Risk Officer at Payrix.
Changes to technology, regulations, and economic conditions are shaping an already dynamic industry. So what can payments professionals do to adapt? According to panelist Julie Schwartz, “It's finding that balance of working smarter, not harder.”
In this session, our panelists delve into how they work smarter, and also discuss the things that keep them up at night.
Key Takeaways: What Keeps Our Panelists Up At Night
CJ Schneller: “We have controls in place to weed out the bad actors on our payment platform. Those controls have improved over time, but the bad actors have gotten more sophisticated over time, so we always have to stay one step ahead… . Payment facilitators can now board marketplaces, which just adds additional layers between the true consumer [and the] merchant all the way upstream to the financial institution.”
Julie Schwartz: I also think about how [to] work smarter [when] you're managing all of the new releases and updates and requirements that come from the regulators and the card brands — because those are ever-changing. They want us to [make] sure that we're doing everything that we're supposed to be doing. They're also putting more controls in place to make sure there's a balance with our workforce, and [we need to] stay on top of those ever-evolving changes.”
Julie Fergerson: “The thing that keeps me up at night right now is the unintended consequences of all these great new mandates and regulations. We're seeing it right and left. What about the debit card ruling the Federal Reserve came out with? Great, now every issuer can route debit cards when it comes [out] in July for e-commerce transactions. But then I started having conversations with some of those guys. Do you have fraud prevention rules in place for e-commerce? How is this going to work?”
Frictionless Onboarding: The Expectation to Do More Faster
In the midst of these concerns is the mandate to continually “do more faster” while keeping up the same quality of standards.
“Our customers really expect this frictionless onboarding experience and risk management experience. So it's do more faster. And in a lot of cases there's this expectation around collecting less data and providing this really good customer experience,” Billi Jo Wright said.
Panelists described the ongoing tension between rising customer expectations and protecting the company from losses or compliance issues. “[The question is,] how do we stay relevant and competitive while remaining compliant at the same time?” Wright said.
How to Keep Up With Changing Regulations — Nationally and Internationally
Keeping up with changing regulations nationally and internationally is another ongoing challenge. “Depending on the size of your organization, you might not be able to have 100 people in your regulatory compliance team following every local, state, municipal, [and] county [regulation] all the way up to [the] federal [level], ” Fergerson said. While in-house teams are excellent, Ferguson said, there’s no shame in relying on outside counsel to support you.
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For more than a decade LegitScript has partnered with payment service providers to help them mitigate risk and more confidently grow their portfolios. If you have questions about how we can help you reach your business goals and remove cybercriminals from your ecosystem, contact us. We look forward to helping you.
