Kount Reviews

I don't remember every single use case. There were some 13+ cases. I don't know if you know the Intuit payroll system, we acquired it from a company called Paycycle. Paycycle was pretty good in that it was generating a few hundred million dollars per year as revenue. And that's what prompted Intuit to buy payroll. It's an old application, from the late nineties, when Java was proven to be one of the top technologies for building enterprise applications. We had the state of the art technology, which was used in the early 2000s which is the JSF-JSP.

Of course, we have now moved to a lot of other things that are as good as GraphQL and other JavaScript technologies, such as React. React is what we moved on to, but quite a lot of our applications still run on the old one. I've been out of the company since last year, but I'm sure they would have moved everything to React. The work which I did was for integrating the Kount JavaScript frame into the JSP and JSF's. That was my role. It took us all the way. It takes a while. So assume that I'm working for you and you are a small business owner. You've trusted me and I'm running your business and I want to move money out of your bank account to some bank account of my friend which is a standard account. So I have the admin privilege and I make the system add a bank account. I want to make sure that for today's payroll I move about $10,000 and I want to run away.

I think Kount has the means to check if this guy can actually add a bank account, modify, and delete. I don't think deletion is such a serious thing, but it includes bankaccount, deletion, addition, and modification. Especially modification considering these two use cases. 

Across the application, you may have payroll integrated with QuickBooks online accounting system. That's a different type of payroll, the way they interact is different, and there is a stand-alone payroll, and for some reason, users love it a lot. They want stand-alone payroll so that the kind of UI pages are different.

There is another use case: Even the agents can do fraud. So for agents, there was a separate system. Across these three different vertical flavors of Intuit payroll, the first one was with a few cases about banker forms. The second was about running a payroll. Even with running payroll, there are PMs who have the kind of experience with payroll. They come up with what use cases are most important. 

Running payroll is another one. Even in the back-end, there was something that involved Interact, anything and everything about moving money and modifying accounts. Even employee addition is a very sensitive thing. Employee addition and employee modification. Sometimes people simulate that I'm monitoring this employee little by little and there is a lot of fraudulent activity. There can be anything and everything. I had 12 or 13 different use cases when I worked across the three verticals in the field.

There were other competing systems which were there. There were other people and other departments using other software, but Kount stood out in payroll because it was already proven and even payments division was using it. Kount was the best at the time that I was working with it.

Kount is a better solution for us because they are really focused on maximizing sales. A lot of the other proposals that we saw were very focused on automation, machine learning, and driving down the chargeback rate. Of course, that's one goal, but it needs to be a balance between the two, between minimizing your chargeback and your risk but then also enabling as many sales as possible. If I wanted to minimize my chargebacks, I could just turn away and decline a lot of good sales. We need that balance. Kount did the best job marketing and highlighting that it was a solution where they offer AI and machine learning but it's within their tools that if you want to automate things, you can. We took the approach of automating something but we really thought that the human component was important for us to be able to manage the different levels of fraud.

Kount helped us position ourselves in a way where we could use humans. The humans could leverage the technology that Kount provided and are able to adapt and customize it to our needs. We could constantly change things and change the scoring. There's a robust offering of the different things that you can do with Kount whether you want a scoring model with different weights or you want to just set up a ruleset that automates things. The flexibility was what we really enjoyed. It grew over time with us because we started with them around about eight years ago now and so their tool also evolved immensely. They're very clear about their roadmap, they provide updates, and they're always striving to be better. Their focus on sales enablement was just as important as minimizing fraud and chargebacks. Whereas a lot of the other providers were just focused on minimizing fraud.

Kount enabled us to reduce our false positives by around 45% for fraudulent transactions, both false positives and false negatives. It helped us determine, make better decisions across the board, and protect our business and our integrity with our customers. We weren't insulting customers or turning good customers away.

We were also able to reduce our manual review rate exponentially. When we first started with them, our manual review rate was something crazy, like 55%, and Kount brought that down to 25%. From 25%, most recently, we were down to 4%. Over the course of those years, it was around 55%, 56% all the way down to 4% which was incredibly helpful for us. That's obviously a huge decrease in the workload.

The customizable rules are just as important because it overlaps with the user-defined field where you can make them very specific to your business. You can alter them and edit them, turn them on, turn them off, whenever you'd like. You can even get it down to almost a scheduling tool where you can say, "Okay, on Monday through Friday, run this rule. Friday to Sunday, run this other rule set." And so you can manage the different fraud trends that you're seeing that way. It helps you keep your manual overview rate as low as possible.

Another great feature is their ability to integrate with other third-party solutions like Ekata and Chargebacks911. Ekata is an ID verification and they all integrate together so you can just click on a link and all of your transaction data is automatically populated. Kount a very inclusive solution with a lot of different features.

We mainly use Kount for fraud prevention.

Our finance team uses this solution. I am a fraud and chargeback analyst.

Right now, because of the pandemic, we are not really expanding our usage with Kount, but there is definitely room for growth.

We avoid losses in multiple ways with Kount. We prevent bad actors from purchasing products, whether it be a digital product, physical product, or even a service. A system like Kount allows us to see all the relevant information surrounding the person performing the transaction. We can assess if they're legitimate or fraudulent and prevent them from purchasing the service or product.