Ecommerce fraud prevention poised for new wave of machine learning disruption, according to Signifyd’s new Chief Scientist

SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Long-Ji Lin has been appointed Chief Scientist at Signifyd, the world’s largest provider of Guaranteed Fraud Protection for ecommerce companies. In his new role, Lin will focus intensively on Signifyd’s modeling and leverage big data analytics to detect fraud across more than 5,000 ecommerce merchants. In addition to the impressive progress made over the past couple of years by machine learning solutions over rules-based systems, Lin sees potential for a significant wave of disruption through improvements in machine learning for the fraud prevention industry. “I see a lot of opportunities to improve fraud detection technology with the help of Big Data and sophisticated machine learning. I want to be part of this evolution, just like I was with the online advertising evolution.”

The growing need for accountability is driving demand for solutions that shift fraud liability away from merchants

Lin holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University and a PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. His experience with large-scale, real-time data systems spans more than two decades and early in his career he helped design and build the online trading platform for Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) before its acquisition by Credit Suisse First Boston in 2001. Most recently Lin was the Chief Scientist at Rocket Fuel where he developed numerous models for the company’s predictive marketing platform. With over 30 patents, Lin is best known for his extensive work for over 15 years in the adtech industry, including innovations that have transformed behavioral analytics and helped create foundational capabilities for user targeting, inventory management and programmatic buying.

Lin introduced numerous sophistications to machine learning models at Yahoo! by optimizing contextual placement and performance from varying creative alternatives provided by advertisers. His innovations played a key role in increasing click-through performance by more than 20 percent for programs leveraging his improved models.

His experience with behavioral analytics provides a robust foundation for the ecommerce fraud prevention industry. Especially as market changes in this industry look to emulate changes that occurred in digital advertising more than a decade ago. One such change resembles the shifting pricing models from CPM to CPC to CPA as digital advertisers held their advertising networks accountable for converting users, and not just collecting impressions. For fraud prevention, the growing need for accountability is driving demand for solutions that shift fraud liability away from merchants, instead of simply providing a score or recommendation for each incoming order.

Signifyd is the largest amongst this new group of solution providers with its ability to provide a 100 percent financial guarantee against fraud and chargebacks for more than 5,000 merchants globally. While fraud liability shift for online merchants was introduced only a couple of years ago, it has already gained significant traction. According to a survey by Internet Retailer, 14 percent of merchants were already seeking Guaranteed Fraud Protection from their fraud prevention solution provider at the end of 2016.

In his new role, Lin will provide much-needed predictive capabilities for an industry where orders are still reviewed manually. For advertisers, Lin perfected his model’s ability to predict which users would take each desired action, such as a clicking on an ad or purchasing from an advertiser. For ecommerce merchants, Lin is focused on innovations in modeling to verify if the user who made the purchase on their site is in fact the person authorized to do so, or if they are a fraudster. A key component in determining this outcome is Signifyd’s ability to acquire, aggregate and evaluate massive amounts of third party data in real-time to augment transaction data from ecommerce merchants. Signifyd’s Engineering team has built their systems to scale specifically to handle such data and transaction volume requirements.

Lin’s arrival in the fraud prevention industry comes at a time when large retailers are losing billions to ecommerce fraud and small merchants are at risk of losing their entire business to sophisticated, targeted attacks. As strategic partnerships are formed across the industry to reduce and ultimately eliminate fraud losses for merchants, the need to scale protection is growing as transaction volumes continue to grow and accelerate across more devices than ever before.