Questions to Ask
Ask vendors the questions that matter.
In addition to asking about specific features, there are several questions that are worth asking vendors. The following questions help in understanding the maturity of products and focus on potential breakpoints of projects.
Do you specialize by serving specific industries?
Some vendors focus on the finance industry and/or payments fraud prevention. Others focus on ecommerce. Some provide services that work across multiple industries.
Does your solution help customers with regulatory or standards compliance? If so, which ones?
Depending on geography, payments service providers are often subject to PCI-DSS, EMV 3DS2, and EU PSD2. Organizations that hold consumer or citizen personal information may be subject to various privacy regulations such as EU GDPR, Canada's PIPEDA, California's CCPA, etc. Financial institutions need to comply with AML and KYC. Health care providers are subject to HIPAA in the US. FRIP solutions can aid their customers in complying with different regulatory frameworks.
What are the emerging fraud trends that you are seeing?
Fraudsters are constantly innovating, and FRIP solution providers are usually aware of their changing tactics. If the FRIP vendor has special expertise in finding and deterring the kinds of fraud your organization is experiencing, then this topic merits further discussion.
Describe how your fraud research team finds new fraud types or perpetrators and how they build detection into your platform.
How they answer this question can give you insight into the size, depth, and specialties of their fraud research team, and how well and how quickly they can turn fraud risk intelligence into actionable services.
What are your false positive and false negative rates? Do you provide guarantees against customer losses due to missed detections?
Both false positives and negatives cost organizations money. False positives may drive customers away, and false negatives directly impact the bottom line. Ask for statistics and customer references, if possible.
Although providing refunds or guarantees is less common now, some FRIP solution providers do back up their services with guarantees. It is worth asking about.