Sponsor Inteview: Dirk Mourik - Global Director of Enterprise Strategy, eCommerce, Marketplaces, and Payments at Ekata

FinTech Connect 2022 arrived back with a bang after a three year absence. As one of the leading sponsors at FinTech Connect, Dirk Mourik at Ekata explored the top payments trends he predicts ahead of 2023, how the payments industry has accelerated over recent years and how their collaboration between Ekata and Mastercard has a speed up their shared goal of building trust within the digital economy.

Please give us a little introduction on your current role and what you do.

I’m a Global Director of Enterprise Strategy at Ekata, a Mastercard company. I’m focused on the long-term growth and innovation of our identity strategy within current and new market segments. This includes identifying new product capabilities, distribution channels, and partnerships.

What do you consider your biggest professional achievement to date?

I’ve successfully launched leading-edge solutions in eCommerce and Payments and realised growth through acquisitions and innovation. But the best is still to come; I’m working on some very exciting stuff together with the diverse and talented people at Ekata and Mastercard!

What are the top payments trends you are predicting for 2023? Where should FIs and merchants be focusing their efforts in the next few years?

First, the next frontier for eCommerce payments under PSD2 is optimising pre-authentication risk decisioning. We see a significant opportunity to reach the best possible acceptance rates while keeping fraud at bay. Simply put, this means leveraging TRA exemptions for low-risk transactions and challenging only high-risk transactions. Ekata provides risk signals for merchants, PSPs, and issuers alike that help remove friction for good customers. Second, I expect technology providers that are able to remove barriers for payment teams and put more power in their hands — through system-agnostic, low-code payments orchestration, automation, and analytics solutions — will see traction in 2023.

The payments industry has come a long way in the last 3 years – how have you adapted your business to keep up with the demands and new challenges of your clients?

In 2021, Ekata joined the Mastercard family to accelerate our shared goal of building trust in the digital economy. As consumers move more of their lives online, online businesses have grown to serve them. Over the course of the year, Ekata protected 2.5 billion digital interactions globally against fraudulent activities and enabled better, faster, and more trustworthy onboarding and transaction experiences for consumers and merchants.

The introduction of innovative products and improvements to existing solutions also helped Ekata meet emerging market needs. In 2021, Ekata released a new fraud detection model to help customers better distinguish genuine versus risky interactions, with a 10% increase in product efficacy across the globe. In 2022, Ekata also expanded its account opening solutions to help ecommerce companies and marketplaces worldwide quickly identify and flag risky account sign-ups. Powered by a proprietary data set and machine learning, Ekata’s account opening solutions assess the risk of new accounts in real-time, enabling businesses to create streamlined onboarding experiences for legitimate customers and to reject or add friction to high-risk customers.

Ekata has also strengthened its culture of innovation. For example, every developer is empowered to devote time to explore ideas unconstrained by restrictions, product roadmaps, or a predefined vision. Ekata’s industry-leading Identity Risk Score is powered by several first-to-market features that are the result of this focus on innovation. One of the most prominent is the real-time Network Score, which helps detect global fraud within minutes. This focus on innovation has enabled Ekata to accelerate machine learning pipelines, more rapidly develop new features, and improve machine learning model training and performance. Each of these individual technical innovations improves Ekata’s overall ability to assess risk and identify whether someone is who they say they are.

How do you perceive the opportunity of the metaverse in payments?

The ability to unlock the potential of retail in the metaverse will depend on how seamless and secure the online shopping experience is today. Whether consumers are making in-app purchases or using an avatar to explore products, there needs to be trust on both sides of the interaction – between the consumer and the business. Trust is an essential component to unlocking the potential of the metaverse. 

What is the biggest challenge to merchants in 2022 and how can they prepare for 2023?

The move to ecommerce means that merchants must digitize their businesses, while meeting growing consumer expectations. Merchants need to provide customers with a smoother checkout experience — including continuing to improve upon SCA decisioning processes — as well as to finding ways to keep fraudsters out of their ecosystem entirely, not just at checkout.

Prioritising resources towards building or enhancing risk models — and continuing to expand the identity data that they ingest — is a step in the right direction. This enables merchants to ultimately drive smarter, better business decisions that ensure they aren’t adding unnecessary friction to the checkout process for good customers while also keeping fraudsters at bay.