Introducing Dynamics 365 account protection and loss prevention

Process efficiency is key to growing an e-commerce business. To meet this goal, retailers need better intelligence to better monitor discount, return, and account fraud, helping to protect and improve revenue, reputation, and customer service. As a premium solution partner, Microsoft has deeply invested in artificial intelligence (AI) based systems to help retailers increase process efficiencies in both on premise and online channels.

As e-commerce revenue grows, merchants are facing a drastic increase in fraud, resulting in reduced profits, increased operational expenses, and potential wrongful rejections. Fraud impacts retailers on a local and global scale, ultimately contributing to a suboptimal experience for many of their customers. Retailers’ revenue and reputations are at stake as a result of increased fraudulent account creation and account compromises.

Additionally, although retail is increasingly moving online, it is still predominantly done in brick and mortar stores, where there are other distinct fraud challenges around in-store returns, discounts, and other types of shrinkage. These problems are exacerbated by the new trend of omnichannel commerce, where the customers are completing transactions across channels, such as buy online and pick up in store (BOPUS). For retailers dealing with these challenges, there is often no automated way to understand which store or terminal the fraud is rampant. Moreover, there is also a lack of no exception-based reporting in place for loss prevention investigators that can enable them to zoom in and readily understand these patterns and take corrective actions.

With this in mind, Microsoft is expanding Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to provide merchants with much needed AI to make processes more efficient and protect merchant’s omnichannel revenue.

New capabilities in Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

Back in April, Microsoft announced Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, a cloud-based solution developed to provide fraud protection to fulfill both Microsoft’s and their customers’ needs.

To combat common challenges around account fraud and losses from in-store returns and discounts fraud, we are broadening the scope of the fraud protection portfolio with two new capabilities, account protection and loss prevention respectively. These two capabilities utilize Microsoft’s fraud protection network, which maintains up-to-date connected fraud activity data and incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) capabilities. This is the key feature that supports all our new capabilities for account protection and loss prevention.

As the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection team, we want to protect customers from fraud across the entire spectrum from e-commerce to brick and mortar retail and cover not only purchases but also account related activity, as well as prevent leakage of revenue in stores due to loss of inventory.

Account protection

Retailers have invested in account creation to provide protection and build loyalty with their customers. To combat fraudulent account creation and account takeover, retailers fraud strategies should assess risk at the point of payment and throughout the customer journey.

With the use of artificial intelligence, account protection for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps retailers recognize patterns related to fraudulent e-commerce activities during account creation or attempted hijacking. Account protection aids in decreasing the costs of account fraud by helping reduce the number of fraudulent accounts, in turn protecting the businesses’ reputation and improving customer experiences and satisfaction. Account protection provides retailers with the following benefits:

• Improves the bottom line by reducing fraud activities and friction throughout the customer journey
• Improves business reputation by preventing negative exposure due to fraudulent activity
• Increases customer satisfaction by protecting customer authenticity and privacy

Loss prevention

Merchandise returns are offered to customers by retailers to keep customers coming back and to encourage them to continue making new purchases. While returns are good for customers, they can hurt the bottom line with return fraud posing a real risk to retailers, particularly in physical stores that may have a limited view into in-store fraudulent activity patterns.

With loss prevention for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, retailers can increase operational efficiency and revenue by identifying loss patterns in their physical stores. By using data from Dynamics 365 Commerce systems and the power of AI, loss prevention helps merchants decipher patterns of losses from returns, improper discounts, merchandise mishandling, and inventory turn-over. Loss prevention provides brick and mortar stores with these benefits:

• Helps increase your revenue. Increased revenue through reduction in losses that arise from returns, and deregulated discount sales practices.
• Enables business intelligence. Provide anomaly reporting and actionable insights that allow you to gain visibility into specific business functions that require additional controls.
• Automation and operational efficiency. Help reduce manual effort to determine the business entities and functions that are the risk of losses and enable readily consumable reports and insights that are actionable.

Global retailers have already proven the benefits of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection through timely and accurate identification of potential fraud situations across their stores, reducing discount and return fraud, resulting in millions of dollars in savings for their companies. Through adaptive AI technology, loss prevention identifies transactional patters and inventory data in order to highlight potential instances of fraudulent activity across an entire network of stores, while safeguarding confidential information and supporting privacy controls.

Next steps

As a global e-commerce leader, Microsoft cares about the bottom line just like you, and encourages you to learn more by visiting the web page Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and viewing the product video. Account protection and loss prevention will be available on 3/2/2020 for preview so you can request to try the new capabilities.