Paymentech, Dallas, Tex., recently introduced OnGuard, a new suite of fraud protection products and solutions to help protect agains transaction fraud.
   As purchases of goods and services by mail, telephone and Internet increase, so does a merchant's exposure to fraud. According to recent studies, Internet transaction fraud is 12 times higher than in-store fraud. In 2001, merchants lost $700 million in revenue due to fraudulent transactions. Transaction World provides monthly updates on the latestfraud developments. Those developments are moving swiftly as merchants try to stay ahead of perpetrators of fraud.
   The Paymentech OnGuard suite offers a comprehensive set of fraud management tools to help merchants with virtually any fraud-related problem. From relatively simple address verification services to sophisticated fraud scoring solutions to specialty services, OnGuard offers a full range of endorsed proprietary and third-party products to better manage fraud exposure and alleviate customer concerns.
   "Merchants are painfully aware of the impact fraud can have on their bottom line," said John Shirey, Paymentech Group Manager. "We process more card-not-present transactions than anyone else in the industry and we have made it our business to become fraud management experts. In creating OnGuard, we recognized merchants face a broad range of fraud problems, and now we offer a broad range of fraud solutions."
   OnGuard encompasses Paymentech's proprietary fraud products as well as premier fraud prevention products, including address verification, card security validation, credit card authentication, transaction scoring, identity authentication and age verification services, in conjunction with our OnGuard partners:
   Experian provides real-time identity authentication to prevent identity theft and safeguard merchants from fraud. They combine intelligent decision-making software and statistical tools with some of the world's most comprehensive databases of consumer and business information.

• iShopSecure, Inc., provides real-time identity authentication that eliminates credit card fraud and identity theft. Their patent-pending products utilize the most robust databases available and insure authenticated transactions up to $5,000.
• Fair, Isaac and Co., Inc (through the division that was formerly HNC Software Inc.), provides real-time fraud scoring to card-not-present merchants. Neural-network models and patented profiling technology work together to discern the probability that a transaction is fraudulent.
• Arcot Systems Inc., provides e-commerce payment authentication for Verified by Visa and the MasterCard Guaranteed Payment program. Arcot provides secure, reliable and highly scalable enterprise and class solutions for both individual merchants and merchant aggregators.
• ClearCommerce, provides e-commerce risk management and payment processing software. The company serves more than 45,000 businesses worldwide. ClearCommerce offers software that plugs into a merchant's checkout process. This enables the merchant to manage cardholder authentication for Verified by Visa and MasterCard's Guaranteed Payment programs.
• Retail Decisions (ReD), provides a fully managed risk management and fraud detection service that combines neural-network technology, access to proprietary databases, rules based processing, expert human insight and a web-based transaction review tool designed to provide a best-of breed risk management approach.
• VerifyMe provides a patent-pending fraud prevention service using government-issued ID database checks, algorithms and an optional web-based signature capture to instantaneously verify identity and age for citizens in 112 nations.