John Canfield

The payments market's hottest growth is coming from small- & micro-businesses, individuals, and fundraisers. The burrito truck using Square or the Care.com babysitter accepting credit cards through a mobile app are the new normal. These non-traditional entities present new challenges for payment risk management because there is little traditional risk data on these micro businesses.   A next generation of risk management is emerging that incorporates new data sources. Social network profiles and digital footprints can be used to confirm one's identity. Additionally, marketplaces and business software providers who integrate payments into their offering have a lot of data about their merchants' identity, operations, and reputation that can be leveraged. The challenge is collecting this heterogeneous data from hundreds of data sources and storing it in a usable data model. The other obstacle is building the policy, rules, and machine learning systems that will make optimal decisions on this data.   This talk will discuss the changing payment ecosystem, innovations in mining and organizing unstructured data from many sources, and approaches to decisioning for loss minimization and user experience.