Micro-payment company Stripe has helped pioneer the portable payment systems that let everyone from food trucks to craft vendors at your local farmer’s market accept debit and credit. Now the company is fighting back against one of the biggest, scariest threats to a tiny independent seller: fraud.
Enter “Stripe Radar”
The new service, Radar, uses a variety of metrics to verify accounts. From the company’s site:
“Old ways of combating fraud were never designed for modern internet businesses. Stripe Radar is powered by advanced machine learning algorithms that automatically learn from Stripe’s global network of businesses to identify and prevent fraud.”
Stripe is aided by its size and market share: Even if your food truck has never swiped a particular card before, there’s a 80 percent chance that some tracker somewhere has already logged it.
It’s Free, For Now
Techcrunch offers a little inside baseball on the new feature with their guess that Stripe Radar might wind up solely in a paid subscription feature, should one ever be offered:
“Radar is being rolled out globally as part of Stripe’s primary payments service, meaning companies that use Stripe’s API for payments do not need to pay extra or do anything in particular to turn it on.
That may change down the line if and when Stripe — which has now raised around $300 million and is valued at around $5 billion — begins to add in more features and decides to monetize the service separately. (Its current, basic payments rate is a 2.9% commission plus 30 cents per successful card charge in the U.S. and fees vary in other markets.)”
Regardless, the new service will likely be well-loved by Stripe’s user base, which has long been threatened by credit fraud. The company has an in-depth guide to their AI process, for those interested in learning how it works.