Sift’s Partner-First Strategy: Activate, Accelerate And Win Against Fraud

Online fraud is a constantly growing issue in an ever-evolving tech landscape, and innovative solutions are needed to protect partners from threats they didn’t even know existed. Now, Sift is leaning into its AI-powered fraud prevention platform to change the game, saving more than $4 million in losses annually.

CRNtv’s Jon Alba spoke with Leslie Lorenco, vice president for Global Channel Sales for Sift, to explore how Sift’s overhauled partnership program is assisting in using AI to protect against fraud.

Jon Alba: Fraud has traditionally lived under the umbrella of the finance organization. So why are we seeing CISOs take ownership of that now?

Leslie Lorenco: What we're seeing right now and sort of what we're in the middle of is what I like to call the “cyber fraud fusion.” So basically, what we're seeing, is CISOs are responsible for protecting digital identity and access. That’s why CIAM is a big thing. It's a pretty common item that CISOs want to care about. They want to know who's entering their network. They want to know why, how, and should you be? There is the bigger question.

And so what we're seeing now is as consumers are going through their journeys and starting that CIAM play with companies, that the CISOs are seeing fraud pop up a lot. And so you're seeing account takeovers and known good actors that a CISO normally would have trusted to be in their environment, now being taken over by bad actors.

Jon: On the AI front, what role does AI actually play on the defense side, and how is it helping partners leverage it to protect customers?

Leslie: So, at our core, Sift is a data AI company.

We take in trillions of transactions each year, and we correlate that data to try and figure out the unknown, as people like to call it. So Sift is able to look at that data and quickly adapt to new threats and trends that we're seeing. There's no manual tuning required.

Given the proliferation of fraud now and with AI sort of exponentially making this a bigger problem, you can't address this manually anymore. You can't have a fraud team doing checks and balances across the ledger. It's not going to work.

So, this is a great time for our partners who have already traversed this journey with cybersecurity. They're used to seeing anti-virus, ransomware, things like that pop up and mutate very quickly. So now they can leverage the Sift AI platform to help them defend their customers in a new vector that they haven't dealt with before.

Why not bring the AI closer to those, to your data, where you get lower latency, lower cost to transfer that data and typically a more secure environment?

Jon: Sift recently highlighted its work in a case involving Hertz. This was a pretty big deal. What made that such a unique fraud prevention challenge?

Leslie: Basically, Hertz Platinum customers were having their accounts taken over. And as a Hertz customer, the whole spiel is like, ‘I get to register and walk on site, take the keys. and go.’ And so what ended up happening was Hertz platinum customers were having fake reservations put, and fraudsters were going to the Hertz locations and physically stealing the cars.

So what Sift was able to do was, Sift was actually able to come in and look at fraud signals for Hertz to be able to dictate and define whether or not this was an ATO (account takeover). So things like, “yeah, this is our platinum customer, however, this isn't the IP address they normally book reservations from, this isn't the state, this isn't the venue they would normally place the reservation, because it's not their home airport,” or something like that.

And so we're able to help Hertz catch those cases before we end up having an account takeover and then losing a very valuable platinum customer.

Jon: Sift just recently overhauled its partner program. So, what was the driving force behind the refresh?

Leslie: What we're seeing now is consumers entering that digital transformation cycle, and we're seeing that their customers are now getting access, not getting access. And it's really becoming a driving force for IT teams to be able to figure out how do we handle what we don't know.

Sift now has integrations into Okta. We have integrations into Ping. And I think what we're seeing is just an extension of that digital transformation journey that partners are already so well versed in.

To learn more about Sift, you can visit its partner page.