Welcome to the Payments & More podcast with host Nico as he chats with the top men and women from the payment industry. They bring their stories and perspectives to shed a new light on what is hot in the payment space now and for the future. In this episode, Mark Walick joins the conversation. Mark has 20 years of experience in this industry and has taken care of eBay, Apple, and Google fraud management in the course of his career. Today he shares his views on data fraud prevention and AI orchestration.

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Nico begins the conversation asking Mark where he’d be if he wasn’t at his current job right now. Find out what Mark’s been considering recently with a startup that would work to bring paying customers into a new democratized way of paying. Nico jumps in with a minute of praising Mark and his high capacity to be working early in the morning through the late hours of night. Is Mark continuing to learn? Mark answers with a resounding yes! With the digital revolution, he is learning, interested, and scared all at the same time.

 

Nico shifts the conversation towards the details of fraud prevention, outsourcing, and insurance for fraud. Mark says that in the end, there are commonalities for all companies, despite the amount of data they have access to, that will always be issues for fraud. No data, no fraud prevention, but with data come mistakes that cannot be completely eradicated. Mark shares about his position concerning outsourcing and the importance to have commitment for data sciences, but also for tools and adjustments. Internal management requires a dedicated team and budget. Is chargeback warranty companies’ insurance for fraud prevention? Mark says that if the economics are present, then this makes sense, but the issue rises from the high price points and misaligned incentives with efficiencies and costs of processing fraud.

 

Turning towards technology, Nico asks Mark about the latest technology that has caught his attention. Mark discusses the rising artificial intelligence and strategy behind tracing the dollar to see who is benefitting from the cash flow. Mark emphasizes his concern for this becoming a for-profit situation when it should not be.

 

Nico jumps into the Golden Minute and the Allyiz box game sections of the episode next. Mark shares about how he sees his own career as he answers a question of what his call to action would be for this industry. Listen to his understanding of PSD2, credit cards as proxy, reliance on card rails, and the desire to change how we use technology. Nico asks Mark about his project for acceptance optimization in working to trace the dollar and shift their focus from reducing risk in fraud, to working to outpace the losses and shrink the losses naturally, while growing the top line.

 

The episode draws to a close as Mark shares about his own failure and lesson learned. Find out more about his time at Apple and how this was a challenging transition both personally and professionally! Finally, Mark leaves the listeners with these final words: look at your data.

 

Please don’t forget to rate this episode, share, and subscribe!

 

 

Timestamps

0:49 Mark introduced

1:32 Welcome Mark

3:00 Praises for Mark

3:49 Is he still learning?

4:37 Issues despite data available

6:05 Position on outsourcing

7:58 Chargeback warranty companies

10:40 Latest technology

13:50 Concern for profiting from this

16:35 Golden Minute

20:27 Acceptance optimization

25:45 When did he fail?

28:10 Look at your data

 

 

About Mark Walick

Mark's been working in the online payments industry for over 20 years.  As the head of payments product for GSI Commerce, Mark focused on enabling payments, mitigating risk and managing chargebacks for some of the most notable brands in the world.  The second half of his tenure has been at Apple and Google, building world class fraud mitigation solutions and products to address the much larger issue of false declines.  Born and raised on the east coast, Mark lives in sunny California.

 

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn

 

 

About Allyiz

Allyiz (pronounced allies) is the “go-to” company for payments experts for businesses who want to source knowledge, time or people. Allyiz distinguishes ourselves from consultancies by bringing the expertise and experience of professionals who have successfully run the function on the business side and have done it well many times. We run short projects and deliver actionable results.

 

Connect with Allyiz on LinkedIn or at www.allyiz.com