Ekata protected 2.5b digital interactions globally in 2021

By Joy Dumasia

Ekata, capped by joining the Mastercard family to accelerate the shared goal of building trust in the digital economy. As consumers moved more online lives, online businesses grew to serve them. Over the year, Ekata solutions protected billions of digital interactions from fraud and enabled better, faster and more trustworthy onboarding and transaction experiences for consumers and merchants.  

“By any measure, this was an incredible year for us as a business and as a team,” said Rob Eleveld, Ekata’s CEO. “We had the right mix of product, people and strategy to anticipate and navigate the tectonic changes taking place in the global economy. And now, as a part of Mastercard, we have the partnerships and scale to help more businesses know their customers, and, in turn, enable more people to safely interact online.”

Entering the second year of the global pandemic, consumers continued to transform how they shop, bank and work, pushing many day-to-day transactions online and rapidly expanding the digital economy. While the availability of vaccines allowed in-person interactions to rebound somewhat in the US, Mastercard found that roughly 20% of the peak in the shift to eCommerce has stuck permanently for the retail sector. According to Mastercard SpendingPulse™, which measures overall retail sales across all payment types, including cash and check, US eCommerce sales increased 9.4% year-over-year in November 2021. 

The rapid adoption of online commerce also offered fraudsters new opportunities and new incentives. This only increased the challenge of providing frictionless experiences for consumers while minimizing fraud for businesses. As the digital economy continued to grow rapidly in 2021, accurate and seamless digital identity verification became even more critical to businesses.  

As a result, there was unprecedented query volume around the world. Here are a few highlights: 

• Powered by machine learning and an unparalleled data set, Ekata protected close to 2.5 billion digital interactions globally against fraudulent activities in 2021. 
• Query volume grew 258% in APAC, in part driven by new partnerships, and 35% in LATAM in 2021 over the previous year, as reflected in the volume of API calls to the Ekata Identity Engine.  
• New partnerships helped drive a 48% increase in partner-related queries from 2020 to 2021. 
• Query volume among banking and lending (+55%) and eCommerce (+26%) customers significantly increased. 
• In 2021, Ekata also saw significant gains in the financial service sector, driven by new partnerships with Equifax and Feedzai. 

Recently, IBS Intelligence reported that Identity is defined as the qualities of a person or who a person is. In simple words, identity is a set of claims that can describe you different from others.