Industry Leaders Join Ethoca to Drive Global Network Expansion in EMEA and Asia-Pacific

Toronto, Canada; Austin, TX; and London, UK - Ethoca, the industry standard for collaboration-based technology solutions that help card issuers and online merchants increase transaction acceptance and stop ecommerce fraud and chargebacks, today announced it has expanded its international team with two industry veterans.

Keith Groves will serve as Director, Issuer Relations, EMEA, a role focused on helping card issuers in the region maximise the chargeback and fraud recovery benefits they realise through Ethoca’s global network. Brett Small will serve as Regional Director, APAC, and is responsible for expanding Ethoca’s card issuer and merchant network in the Asia-Pacific region.

Every day, 29 banks and 500+ credit unions on Ethoca’s global network send confirmed fraud and customer dispute data to Ethoca. Ethoca then sends this data to 2,100+ merchants globally in the form of near real-time alerts that arrive within hours – not weeks later through the inefficient chargeback process. Because Ethoca Alerts provide an early warning on fraud and disputes that have already been confirmed by cardholders, Ethoca’s merchant customers around the world have the opportunity to stop fraud, halt the delivery of goods and services, and issue a refund to avoid the impending chargeback. Card issuers benefit by avoiding chargeback processing costs and recovering fraud losses – including 3D Secure and low-value transaction write-offs – faster and with a fraction of the cost and effort. With increasing participation from card issuers and merchants, the ‘network effect’ multiplies: both parties get more value by stopping more fraud, avoiding the costly chargeback process and ensuring a better customer experience.

The value of the Asia-Pacific and EMEA ecommerce markets is growing exponentially. eMarketer expects Asia-Pacific to take the global lead in B2C ecommerce sales in 2015 with a total market share of 33.4 percent, with EMEA making up 30.7 percent.[1] With ecommerce sales that grew 36% in 2014 to $615 billion, Asia as a geographic ecommerce market is now twice as big as the U.S. online retailing market.[2] With the continuing growth in cross-border CNP commerce, fraud levels on international transactions are widely expected to increase. This results in increased losses for global ecommerce merchants and card issuers, and leads to lower overall acceptance rates as both parties look to stem rising losses. Ethoca’s collaboration network helps to solve these problems.

Armed with in-depth payment card and fraud experience, Keith has helped to shape, implement and deliver innovative acceptance and fraud prevention strategies for some of the largest financial institutions in Europe. A seasoned risk professional with 28 years of financial services industry experience, he has held various senior positions with MasterCard, HSBC and was most recently Executive Vice President at G2 Web Services.

During his 18-year career, Brett has held senior positions at Australia’s largest banks. He was Head of Financial Crime and Head of Fraud Risk with the National Australian Bank (NAB), as well as Senior Manager of Fraud Strategy, Australia & Global, for Australia New Zealand Bank (ANZ). He has built a reputation for consistently implementing fraud strategies that outperform the industry norms while fostering a culture of constant innovation and evolution in combatting fraud.

“The EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions are key growth markets for Ethoca in an increasingly borderless ecommerce landscape,” said Andre Edelbrock, Co-Founder and CEO, Ethoca. “CNP fraud is not only growing domestically in these markets, but our existing card issuer and merchant customers in the U.S., Canada and the UK are frequently urging us to expand the global reach of the Ethoca Network to help stop fraud and chargebacks that result from cross-border fraudulent transactions. Bringing proven leaders like Keith and Brett into our company will accelerate our presence in these regions and help all of our customers make ecommerce simply about commerce.”

About Ethoca

Ethoca is making ecommerce simply about commerce. We are the leading, global provider of collaboration-based technology that enables card issuers, ecommerce merchants and online businesses to increase card acceptance, stop more fraud, recover lost revenue and eliminate chargebacks. Through the Ethoca Network – the first and only of its kind in the industry – we are closing the information gap between card issuers and merchants. This unique capability makes fraud intelligence and card acceptance insight available and actionable in real time. Nine of the top ten ecommerce brands, seven of the top nine U.S. card issuers, three of the top five UK card issuers and more than 2,100 ecommerce businesses around the world rely on Ethoca solutions and the network that powers them. To find out more, please visit us online at www.ethoca.com.