Braintree, a global payment platform, has announced enhanced fraud protection for merchants that leverages purchasing behavior. The network effect will assist all Braintree merchants, including startups, the company said, shielding them from various threats and reducing their risk of fraudulent activity and attendant financial loss.

By analyzing purchasing activity from thousands of online and mobile retailers, Braintree said in a news release, the company creates rules that take into account hundreds of variables across the network for merchants to apply to their business. The technology goes beyond looking at a customer's purchase behavior at a single merchant, the company said, by analyzing purchasing behavior across a large number of merchants. The company said the resulting insights let it accurately recognize fraud and take appropriate actions.

"Our experience in processing more than $10 billion of online and mobile commerce annually has given us the data and expertise needed to deliver comprehensive tools that further protect our merchants and stop fraudsters," Braintree CEO Bill Ready said in the release. "Fraud is not a problem limited to large merchants. Our goal is to provide startups everything they need to grow and scale, including fraud protection."

Historically, startups and smaller merchants have struggled to keep up with rapidly changing fraud threats because they lack dedicated resources and expertise, Braintree said. Conversely, large enterprises spend massive resources in the form of time and money to protect themselves from fraud, the company said, which cuts into already tight profit margins. The enhancements are meant to deliver substantial savings to large retailers while democratizing access for startups to sophisticated fraud tools used by some of the world's best-known brands.

"We recently encountered a distributed attack from fraudsters who used a database of stolen credit cards on our site," Vlad Gurgov, CTO and co-founder of Virool, said in the release. "This incident highlighted that we needed a much more robust solution than we had in place with our previous provider, particularly as our business is rapidly growing."

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