RSA spins out fraud and risk unit as Outseer

RSA Security’s fraud and risk intelligence business is to be spun out into a standalone company called Outseer to highlight its payment authentication and bank account monitoring services, which are in use at about 6,000 financial institutions, overseeing 20 billion transactions a year.

Led by CEO Reed Taussig, the new company, which will still operate under the RSA umbrella, specialises in identity technology to deliver advanced fraud detection rates and remove the need for customer intervention. RSA said spinning it out would “transform customer authentication and accelerate revenue for the digital economy”.

“Outseer is the culmination of decades of science-driven innovation in anti-fraud and payments authentication solutions,” said Taussig. “As the digital economy continues to deepen, the Outseer mission to liberate the world from transactional fraud is essential. Our role as a revenue enabler for the global economy will only strengthen as every digital business continues to scale.”

Outseer will inherit three core services from its parent: Outseer Fraud Manager (formerly RSA Adaptive Authentication), a risk-based account monitoring service; 3-D Secure (formerly Adaptive Authentication for eCommerce), a card-not-present and digital payment authentication mapping service; and FraudAction, which detects and takes down phishing sites, rogue apps and fake social media pages.

These are underpinned by a global data network of verified fraud and transaction data, and a proprietary identity-centric risk graph that RSA claims delivers 95% fraud detection rates.

RSA said that with the Covid-19 pandemic having fuelled “unprecedented” growth in digital commerce, payment card schemes, banks and commerce providers have seen massive growth in fraudulent transactions and orchestrated attacks on their payment networks. To meet this challenge, it said, Outseer will focus its innovation on payments authentication, mapping to the EMV 3-D Secure 2.x payment standard, and incorporating new technology integrations across the payments and commerce ecosystem.

“Outseer’s reason for being isn’t just focused on eliminating payments and account fraud,” said Taussig. “These fraudulent transactions are often the pretext for more sinister drug and human trafficking, terrorism and other nefarious behaviour. Outseer has the ability to help make the world a safer place.”