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Comment by gotothrowaway | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that stripe has always done some level of fraud protection (e.g. Monitoring to ensure someone isn't incrementing through card numbers to find one that works)

This seems like a necessary component of any "effective acquiring bank"[1] because of where the liability falls. In the event of fraud, Stripe can get hosed and they need to protect themselves.

I imagine they wouldn't have taken the step of lowering their payout delay from 7 days to 2 days unless they were confident in their fraud detection abilities.

Can you elaborate on what about WePays fraud protection is better? Am I dead wrong?

Note: in no way affiliated with Stripe, just once considered starting something in this industry.

[1] I'm defining Stripe and WePay as "effective acquiring banks." I guess you can call them ISO's too. They're positioned somewhere in the web of words - but bottom line is that their the ones that find merchants that need to process cards.

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Bill from WePay here - thanks for asking.

The value proposition of WePay Clear isn't entirely captured in TechCrunch's choice of a headline, though they certainly have sensationalized it by drawing a Stripe comparison.

Yes, WePay Clear takes on fraud responsibility & shields the platform. (as does Stripe Connect)

However, WePay Clear does this in a whitelabel fashion, so that sellers on platforms do not need to create a WePay account.

In other words, it's not just fraud protection or whitelabel - it's whitelabel payments AND fraud protection.

Our launch partner in this is Freshbooks. Freshbooks currently offers several payment gateways/merchant accounts as an option to sellers like Authorize.net and Stripe. But their new primary "Freshbooks Payments" offering is built on WePay Clear. You can check out the experience here: http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2014/10/01/introducing-paymen...

"so that sellers on platforms do not need to create a WePay account" So then how does the seller get the money? Confused.

The platform creates one on their behalf, it's transparent to them.

Thanks Bill.

Is there anything about the fraud protection that's particularly noteworthy?

I thought Stripe Marketplaces addresses this use case, but perhaps the liability still falls on me (the developer) with Marketplaces?

Our VP of Risk, John Canfield, was a senior leader on eBay's Trust & Safety team for almost a decade. He did a great talk on Veda, our risk engine, at QCon - check it out here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/big-data-payment-risk-man...

Re: Stripe Marketplaces, yes - that's my understanding based on my conversations with our customers.

Stripe Marketplaces isn't actually a product, there are two products, Stripe Connect and then the Trasnfers API. In the Stripe Connect set up every vendor in the marketplace has their own Stripe account and then each vendor is responsible for things like chargebacks, disputes, etc. The marketplace is just authorized to initiate API calls on behalf of the vendor (so the marketplace can handle the disputes and refunds, but the money comes from the vendor).

With the Transfers API, the marketplace just ACHs funds from their Stripe account to the vendor's bank account, so the Marketplace has to handle all the liability.

> My understanding is that stripe has always done some level of fraud protection (e.g. Monitoring to ensure someone isn't incrementing through card numbers to find one that works)

Yeah, for sure. We (Stripe) power many commerce platforms today[1], so we've been able to accumulate a decent amount of training data. It's probably also worth pointing out that our functionality for platforms like these protects the platform from risk losses, and has from the start. But, more competition is good for users, and congrats to WePay on the launch.

[1] Twitter, Facebook, Wave Accounting, Shopify, BigCommerce, Freshbooks, GoDaddy, Wufoo, and more.

First remember that WePay is for platform companies-ones that want to allow their users to take funds, not single merchant apps. So crowdfunding sites, marketplaces, and business tools like Freshbooks, ConstantContact, and InvoiceASAP. In a two-sided platform, there's a lot more chance of fraud because you have to worry about both the buyer and the seller.

Example: Crowdfunding Campaign. I start a campaign, charge a bunch of stolen cards, pull the money out, and disappear.

WePay uses a wide variety of machine learning, anomaly detection, social risk (through our proprietary Veda Risk Engine), and transaction analysis to stop fraudulent transactions from occurring on our partner platforms.

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