Signifyd Sees Accelerated Innovation With Expansion of Global R&D Centre in Northern Ireland

  • E-Commerce
  • 19.11.2019 11:58 am

Signifyd, a global leader in ecommerce fraud protection, has seen its new research and development centre grow faster than expected, contributing to the Silicon Valley-based company’s ability to launch an unprecedented number of products in the past nine months.

The company announced its Northern Ireland R&D centre in February with a plan to hire 150 employees. With its current headcount of more than 60, Signifyd has been able to fuel its hyper-growth and the innovative product development necessary in an era of ecommerce disruption. 

“The depth of the Northern Ireland talent pool has outstripped our high expectations, meaning we’ve been able to fill crucial jobs at a pace that has allowed us to extend our leading position in the industry,” Signifyd CEO and Co-Founder Raj Ramanand said. “We never doubted that Belfast was the right place to expand our R&D. We look forward to the years of growth ahead.”

Signifyd marked the progress by hosting an opening ceremony for the expanded R&D centre, housed at River House in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. The centre provides technical innovation and support for features and products serving Signifyd’s customers worldwide.

Developers and technical teams in Northern Ireland work closely with colleagues in Silicon Valley by embracing a microservices model. The model calls for small, agile and autonomous teams to develop, build, deploy and monitor their own code — while constantly communicating with U.S. teams, without being constrained by dependencies. 

To mark the opening, Silicon Valley business leaders, including Ramanand, Head of Human Resources Emily Mikailli and Vice President of Corporate Communication Stefan Nandzik joined with Belfast leaders, including Director of Engineering Trevor McCullough, to celebrate the milestone.

“The Belfast team has completely changed the landscape of Signifyd for the better,” Mikailli said. “There is now no Signifyd without Belfast and everything we’ve done over the last year and everything we do moving forward will reflect the intellectual heft and innovative spirit we have in Belfast.” 

The Belfast team has helped fuel the growth that led to Signifyd being recognised as one of North America’s fastest-growing innovation companies, landing the company on the 2019 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list.

The expanded R&D centre has positioned Signifyd to continue to support brands such as Lacoste, FOREO, Pure Scooters, Jessops and thousands of others while attracting additional global brands going forward. 

The Belfast team has also contributed to an unprecedented run of product releases dating back to early in the year with the launch of Chargeback Recovery, which expands Signifyd’s Commerce Protection Platform beyond fraud chargebacks to significantly automate the management and recovery of non-fraud chargebacks. 

Next came INR Protection, which refers to “item not received” and extends Signifyd’s expertise and guarantee to claims from a customer that an order was never delivered. Then, this summer, Signifyd launched Seamless SCA, a solution that allows European merchants to comply with the stricter customer authentication requirements contained in the PSD2 regulations that took effect in September.

Seamless SCA was the first strong customer authentication (SCA) solution certified by EMVCo for the 3DS2.2 protocol. The solution provides a combination of technology and infrastructure that allows authorisation to be completed in the most efficient manner, depending on the order's circumstances, and shifts fraud liability away from merchants.   

The development velocity Signifyd has achieved since launching the Belfast centre has allowed the company to build an ambitious innovation roadmap for 2020 and beyond that will both rely upon and spur further growth in Northern Ireland. 

Related News