• 17.06.2024 -- 05:54 pm

Financial IT catches up with Moshe Winegarten, CRO of Ecommpay at Money20/20 Europe to discuss the shift from traditional omnichannel approaches and Ecommpay’s innovative strategies.

According to a new report from digital trust technology provider Memcyco, most companies have little, if any, visibility into brand impersonation attacks. Because they lack the ability to detect these kinds of attacks, most companies only learn about them through the social media posts of customers who have been scammed, or through customer reports.

This lack of visibility might go some way towards explaining why just 6% of companies believe they’re actually able to protect their customers from such scams, which are a rising attack vector, used to facilitate many kinds of fraud and reap devastating financial and reputational damages on brands, Memcyco said in its report. 

Brand impersonation, or brandjacking, is a kind of fraud that involves cybercriminals creating lookalike websites that mimic a trusted brand to trick customers into transacting with the page and giving up their personal information. Most often, malicious actors will send a phishing email or SMS or post on social media, encouraging customers of real brands to click a link to what appears to be the brand’s website. Once customers click on the URL, they’re brought to an impersonated version of a brand’s website and are urged to enter their login details or credit card information, which can then be used to harvest user credentials, hijack or clone credit cards and steal money via fake transactions. 

Some kinds of brand impersonation scams can get quite creative, involving fake job ads, for example, or “malvertising”, which refers to fake product ads that appear to have been placed by a legitimate brand, but in fact directs users to an impersonated website. 

Brand impersonation attacks are extremely profitable, with the U.S. Federal Trade Commision reporting that hackers made off with more than $1 billion through such schemes in 2023 alone – up more than 85% in the last three years. One likely reason for this growth is their high success rate, as the hackers put a lot of effort into making their malicious sites appear as close to the original as possible, even using similar URLs. They can impact almost any company, but are especially common with larger brands due to their bigger customer bases. 

Memcyco’s survey of 200 directors and executives at companies operating transactional websites with at least 10,000 visitors per month illustrates why brands and customers alike need to be wary of brand impersonation scams. The responses indicate that 69% of all brands are aware of their websites being impersonated in the past to facilitate brandjacking attacks. What’s more, 87% of companies say they recognize brand impersonation as a growing cybersecurity concern. 

Although this recognition is an encouraging sign, the lack of visibility most definitely is not. Memcyco found that 37% of brands typically only realize their website has been impersonated when they see negative, “brand-shaming” posts on social media. All told, 66% of brands implied their customers are their primary source of intelligence into brand impersonation scams. 

According to Memcyco CEO Israel Mazin, the findings suggest that cybercriminals are increasingly turning to brandjacking precisely because of how easy it is for impersonated websites to fly under the radar. “Attackers rely on companies having limited visibility into these kinds of attacks,” he said. 

Despite recognizing that brand impersonation is a problem, few brands are actually doing much about it. According to Memcyco, 53% of respondents said they lack the cybersecurity tools to deal with brand impersonation attacks, while another 41% said they’re in a position to “partially” deal with them. Just 6% expressed confidence in their ability to prevent such attacks completely. 

Mazin said brand impersonators are taking advantage of a “glaring blindspot in cybersecurity”, namely the “inability of companies to protect their customers online”. 

Another notable finding of Memcyco’s report is that 81% of brands do not reimburse customers who lose out financially to brandjacking attacks. However, many brands understand that they’re likely going to be held responsible in the future anyway, as 48% indicated that they’re aware of new regulations that, if passed into law, will legally obligate them to reimburse customers that are fraud victims.

Memcyco offers an anti-website impersonation solution that aims to detect impersonated websites as soon as they appear online. Moreover, the solution protects customers from the “window of exposure” - from the time an impersonated website goes up until the moment it is taken down. During this time, customers are the most vulnerable to fall victim to scams. With Memcyco’s solution, customers that visit an impersonated website get an immediate Red Alert warning them of the danger, urging them not to proceed. Furthermore, Memcyco provides companies with full details of any attack perpetrated against their customers, providing the crucial visibility needed to prevent such attacks in the future. 

emerchantpay, a leading global payment service provider and acquirer, joins forces with Brazil-based fintech company FitBank to reinforce emerchantpay’s payment proposition in Latin America.  

The alliance enables emerchantpay to strengthen its cross-border payments offering to merchants and partners targeting the sought-after Brazil eCommerce market. By leveraging FitBank’s platform, emerchantpay is providing its global merchants with additional infrastructure to accept Pix and Boleto payments in Brazil. Furthermore, other benefits include fortifying emerchantpay's risk management capabilities, ensuring even more heightened security and fraud prevention measures for merchants.  

This collaboration highlights emerchantpay’s position as a trusted payment service provider for cross-border payments in Latin America and is poised to extend in the future into more countries in the region, such as Mexico and Colombia to name a few. 

This announcement comes at a pivotal moment as demand for seamless and efficient real-time payments transactions in the region continues to grow. Brazil ranks among Brazil ranks among the top countries globally in terms of processed real-time payments. Pix, Brazil’s most popular instant payment method, boasted more than 150 million users, while its transaction value reached nearly 11 trillion Brazilian reals - or roughly 2.1 trillion US dollars, according to Statista. 

“Our alliance with FitBank is a strategic move as we continuously enhance our payment solution in Latin America. By combining FitBank’s modern and innovative platform with emerchantpay’s powerful cross-border payment offering, we are providing our international merchants with an even more resilient and streamlined payment experience, significantly impacting their conversions”, comments Andre Boesing, VP International Business Development at emerchantpay.  

“The collaboration between FitBank and emerchantpay underscores our shared commitment to bring smart and safe solutions for the markets we serve, delivering best in class performance and service. We’re happy to see aligned shared values between the companies, leveraging each company’s strengths. We are well placed to continue leading the market by delivering the most modern solutions for businesses targeting Brazil and the Latin America region”, comments Otávio Farah, co-founder and CEO at FitBank. 

In today's fast-paced digital world, speed has become more than a competitive advantage, it is now an expectation. Businesses are launching globally from day one, moving across borders more seamlessly, and operating in real-time rather than within traditional network constraints. But behind this momentum lies a major challenge: financial infrastructure that remains fragmented, slow to adapt and becoming increasingly out paced with the changing demands of digital businesses. For Serhii Zakharov, the founder and CEO of PayDo, this mismatch inspired a broader vision. As other players in the fintech space were fine-tuning individual tools, Zakharov wanted to rethink everything. He had a simple but profound idea: businesses in digital environments don’t need to have to depend on a lot of providers. They require a strong single partner ,one who grasps their financial landscape from all angles.

This discovery is what initially gave rise to PayDo, an innovative payment ecosystem that brings together the dissection of what many firms thought was going to be a fragmented financial setup.

Serhii Zakharov, the founder and CEO of PayDo

Navigating the Gap: Growth Meets Fragmentation

Zakharov’s experience with digital-first companies revealed one persistent struggle. Many of these businesses were often tied up in antiquated financial structures. Payments required a single provider, currency exchange required another, pay-outs depended on another separate service. What seemed like a viable solution on the surface became a network of inefficiencies.

This fragmentation came with hidden costs. Instead of focusing on product development, teams were forced to spend time managing integrations. Finance departments struggled to reconcile accounts across disconnected platforms while entering new markets felt like starting from ground zero because the financial architecture underpinning it all was too unstable.

Zakharov knew this was not simply an irritant; it was a foundational weakness and addressing it required a solution built at the infrastructure level. 

From Idea to Ecosystem: Rethinking Financial Operations

Rather than trying to offer another service designed exclusively for the specific needs of a single business, Zakharov sought a solution that did away with the need for services altogether. That vision led to PayDo being built as a unified financial ecosystem where businesses can manage every essential financial operation from a single platform. Instead of relying on multiple banks, payment providers, and disconnected systems, PayDo enables companies to accept payments globally, exchange currencies, make local and international payments without traditional banking limitations, manage multi-currency funds, give secure access to team members and pay employees, partners, and contractors worldwide - all within one seamless infrastructure designed to simplify and accelerate global business operations.

This integration is more than just functional, it changes the user experience as well. PayDo doesn’t keep redirecting consumers over to a different platform, and payments flow friction is minimal so businesses can work without a hitch.

What differentiates this approach is not simply added convenience, but rather the application of common sense to payment infrastructure. Rather than force businesses to operate according to rigid financial models, PayDo’s platform adapts to the unique requirements of each organization.

A New Financial Model for the AI Age

These are goals that we face in our fast-evolving technology environment. Much like the AI revolution redefined expectations around intelligence, automation and seamless integration, Zakharov’s vision for PayDo is reshaping how businesses interact with financial infrastructure.

Today’s companies want systems that do more than follow orders, they want systems that comprehend the context and function as a group. Zakharov’s view of PayDo embodies this transformation. The platform operates more like a cohesive financial operating layer than as an isolated set of tools. It allows companies to manage and control their f∂inances in the same manner that they can handle data and product development. Viewed this way, PayDo communicates a transformation that goes beyond its technical aspects: It’s a mindset change. It exchanges siloed processes for shared intelligence and empowers enterprises to be whole but without the siloed constraints as traditional businesses.

Breaking Free from Traditional Banking Limitations

The main benefit about PayDo’s ecosystem is that it mitigates a broad range of banking problems. Businesses can now work more efficiently without having to handle multiple banking relationships to be able to do global business. Instead, they can make transactions, manage costs and pay employees through a seamless, flexible system that gives them greater control. 

PayDo reconceptualizes the financial ecosystem to enable businesses to move forward independently from its historical constraints, alleviating friction and unloading functions to only those required. 

The Founder’s Perspective: Creating a Foundation for Success

What sets this vision apart is Zakharov’s focus on building infrastructure that supports businesses at the core of their operations. He recognised early on that digital businesses needed more than a payment provider, they needed a financial services partner that could support their growth. In doing so, PayDo aims to provide not just a service, but a stronger foundation for long-term innovation and robust pillars for expansion.