Mercator Advisory Group and iovation Estimate Online Short-Term Loans Totaled $13 Billion in 2011

Advisory Firm Recommends Layered Fraud Management Including Device Identification and Reputation Intelligence


PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - Nov 14, 2012) - iovation, the leading provider of device reputation protection against online fraud and abuse, and Mercator Advisory Group today announced the joint release of an executive brief, "Managing Fraud Risk in Online Lending," that estimates loans processed by online short-term lenders totaled $13 billion in 2011. The approximate dollar amount that short-term lenders loaned out from 2006 to 2011 grew more than 120 percent, along with a similar growth in fraud risk.

"With so much short-term lending online, cybercriminals have become extremely creative at conning these lenders into giving them loans with no plans of ever paying them back," said David Fish, Senior Analyst of the Fraud, Risk & Analytics Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group and author of the report. "Common tools on their own, like IP geolocation, are no match for these schemes. A layered approach to fraud risk management in online short-term lending through a combination of device identification and reputation management is no longer merely desirable, it's a necessity."

"With so much money on the line, it's no longer viable that online lenders give loans out without implementing significant, multi-vector fraud management strategies," said Jon Karl, Vice President of Corporate Development at iovation. "The results are extremely tangible. We have seen many instances where monitoring and taking action on device behavior saves an individual online lender millions of dollars a year."

The world's largest online short-term lenders are protected from fraudsters with iovation's ReputationManager 360 fraud prevention service. ReputationManager 360 is the only solution on the market today that not only analyzes the behavior and attributes of individual devices, but also exposes its relationships to other devices and accounts and its history of fraud and abuse across the Internet. In addition to the service's customizable real-time business rules to trigger high-risk activity, iovation's Real IP feature exposes the device's actual location, bypassing proxy IPs and going directly to the source to determine the true IP and geolocation. 

You can get the Mercator Advisory Group's executive brief, "Managing Fraud Risk in Online Lending," at http://bit.ly/SZWNgO.

About iovation
iovation's Reputation Authority™ protects online businesses and their end users against fraud and abuse through an industry-leading combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation and real-time risk evaluation. More than 2,000 fraud managers around the globe leverage iovation's database of Internet devices and relationships between them to determine the level of risk associated with any type of online transaction. Retail, financial services, social network, gaming and other companies make real-time queries to iovation's knowledge base of more than one billion devices from every country in the world. Clients also leverage iovation's Fraud Force Community, an exclusive virtual crime-fighting network of the world's foremost security experts sharing intelligence about cybercrime prevention, device identification and more. Every day, iovation stops over 150,000 fraud attempts. For more information, visit www.iovation.com.

About Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group is the leading, independent research and advisory services firm exclusively focused on the payments and banking industries. We deliver pragmatic and timely research and advice designed to help our clients uncover the most lucrative opportunities to maximize revenue growth and contain costs. Our clients range from the world's largest payment issuers, acquirers, processors, merchants and associations to leading technology providers and investors. Mercator Advisory Group is also the publisher of the online payments and banking news and information portal PaymentsJournal.com. For more information, visit www.mercatoradvisorygroup.com.

Contact Information:

CONTACT:
iovation Inc.
Connie Gougler
503-943-6748