Spreedly + Dodgeball: Payments and Fraud Orchestration for the Future

Our world of digital payments technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and fraudsters are developing their technology right along with it. They use increasingly sophisticated and multi-layered tactics. They leverage bots, exploit account takeovers, and use synthetic identities to bypass a single layer of defense. 

And if you’re accepting payments online, you already know the monumental challenge your business is facing. Merchants have to be able to answer the question, “How do I protect my revenue without creating so much friction that I drive away customers?” 

There’s no single tool that answers that question. The answer lies in a unified strategy, something called fraud orchestration: the art of intelligently coordinating every weapon in your fraud-fighting arsenal to create dynamic, adaptive defense. 

The good news is that we don’t just talk about these problems. We get to know what the real issues are so that we can create the solutions. That’s why we’ve acquired Dodgeball, a modern fraud orchestration company. 

This acquisition is in direct response to the market’s need for a comprehensive, adaptable fraud solution. By combining our open payments platform with Dodgeball’s advanced ability to orchestrate fraud defense, we’re giving you the ability to confront these fraud threats head-on. 

Let’s get to know Dodgeball a little better and learn more about the fraud issues that merchants face, and how you can solve them. 

What is fraud orchestration and why is it important? 

Fraud orchestration is the strategic coordination of multiple fraud detection and prevention tools along with data sources within a unified workflow. It’s not just a stack of fraud solutions placed on top of each other like a lego wall. 

Fraud orchestration involves intelligent sequencing and conditional execution of these tools to create a comprehensive, adaptive, and highly efficient defense system. 

You can think of it like an air traffic controller managing dozens of flights at once. Each flight has its own trajectory, but they all have to be told where to go in a coordinated and efficient way for safety. 

In the same way, fraud orchestration coordinates numerous data points and tools to evaluate the legitimacy of each payment transaction. 

Fraud orchestration was developed as a response to the evolving nature of payment fraud. Modern fraudsters do not rely on a single method. They’ve learned to employ sophisticated tactics that include account takeovers, synthetic identities, bot attacks, friendly fraud, and traditional card-not-present (CNP) fraud.

If you’re only employing a single fraud solution, no matter how advanced it may be, will possess inherent blind spots. A rule-based engine might flag certain patterns, but miss novel attack vectors. A machine learning model might be effective at identifying known fraud types, but could potentially struggle with emerging threats. 

When you use fraud orchestration, you get a layered defense. You can integrate specialized tools, each of which excels at a particular aspect of fraud detection. The rules are then applied dynamically, making sure the most relevant checks are made based on the specific context of a transaction. 

Why is this approach important? First of all, it helps you to reduce fraud loss by increasing the accuracy of detection and minimizing your false positives. You get false positives when transactions are mistakenly declined, leading to lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and increased customer service costs. None of which helps you very much. 

Turning to fraud orchestration can actually help you to enhance your customer’s experience by reducing friction for legitimate buyers. By applying targeted checks only when necessary, your business can streamline the checkout process for trusted customers and improve conversion rates. 

But it also provides a vital layer of operational efficiency and agility. When you are able to centrally manage your fraud workflows through an orchestration layer, you reduce the manual effort required to manage multiple vendor integrations. This also allows you to rapidly adapt to new fraud patterns. 

And lastly, and very importantly, you get cost optimization with fraud orchestration. When you use a “best-of-breed” approach, you can select the most cost-effective fraud tools for specific use cases, instead of relying on one, often expensive, single solution. 

Fraud orchestration transforms fraud prevention from a reactive, piecemeal effort into a proactive, intelligent, and highly coordinated fraud defense strategy, which is absolutely critical for any payments business operating in today's digital economy.

Who is Dodgeball? 

Now that we understand why fraud orchestration is so important, let’s get to know Dodgeball a little better, and give you the background on why this acquisition fits so well into our open payments platform. 

Unlike traditional, and often rigid, fraud solutions, Dodgeball has designed a platform that prioritizes flexibility, customization, and user empowerment. What they really understand is that effective fraud prevention is not a one-size-fits-all situation, but rather a dynamic, adaptable process tailored to the unique needs of every business and its risk profile. 

They’ve put together a sophisticated toolkit that allows for surgical precision in fraud risk management. While other solutions might demand that your business conform to their predefined rules and logic, Dodgeball offers an architecture where you dictate the terms of your own fraud defense. 

What’s really special about Dodgeball is their no-code workflow builder. You get an intuitive and very powerful interface where your fraud teams can construct, test, and deploy intricate fraud detection sequences without relying on extensive technical development cycles. 

Dodgeball's system also uses AI to provide "AI-powered detection" and leverage advanced machine learning models to help identify and mitigate risks. This technology allows for real-time fraud analysis and is a core part of its "best-of-breed" fraud orchestration. 

Imagine having the ability to define a series of checks and then specify precisely when and how these checks are involved. You can also orchestrate these checks across third-party fraud tools, creating a multi-layered defense that is both robust and efficient. 

When you can get down to brass tacks like this, you’re able to gather a lot of information. You might implement stricter checks for high-value international transactions while allowing low-value, domestic repeat purchases to flow through with minimal friction. 

You get that ability in Dodgeball, giving you the opportunity to fine-tune your fraud strategy to achieve the delicate balance between preventing loss and minimizing false positives. 

It’s this type of control that really resonates with us at Spreedly. We believe in choice and control in payment operations. And with Dodgeball’s innovative platform, you ensure that your business can finally manage fraud with the agility and intelligence required in our high-stakes digital economy. 

How does fraud orchestration fit into an open payments platform? 

This combination of fraud orchestration with an open payments platform is as natural a fit as peanut butter and jelly. Our own core philosophy centers around giving you unparalleled choice and flexibility in your payments architecture. 

Using an open payments platform, you can connect a diverse array of payment gateways, processors, and services without proprietary lock-in. That means you can optimize for all kinds of situations, including cost, geographic coverage, payment method and acceptance, and conversion rates. You do that by leveraging the best available providers for each of those specific needs. 

This kind of flexibility can become complex when you need to manage multiple connections and ensure consistent security and risk management across all of your endpoints. That’s precisely where fraud orchestration becomes an absolutely indispensable feature. 

An open payments platform, by its very nature, means that a single payment can traverse multiple gateways, utilize different tokenization services, and involve various alternative payment methods. 

A fraud orchestration layer that manages this intricate web of transitions allows you to get a holistic look at everything instead of operating in silos. 

Dodgeball’s fraud orchestration technology seamlessly integrates into this open environment, acting as an intelligent overlay that unifies fraud defense across all payment choices. Your business is able to apply a consistent, yet adaptive, fraud strategy regardless of the underlying payment provider or method.

Using an open payments platform with fraud orchestration allows you to unify your risk management. You don’t have to rely on a patchwork of gateway-specific tools, instead you can define universal fraud policies managed from a single point of control. 

You’ll have an orchestration layer that aggregates data from various tools that produces a unified, real-time risk assessment before the transaction even reaches the payment gateway. Every payment is rigorously analyzed, regardless of its path. 

You also get the ability to A/B test new fraud tools or update rules across your entire infrastructure. 

It’s a perfect match that ensures your open payments platform is operating as a secure, fortified ecosystem, where you get both payment freedom and adaptive defense. 

Our vision for the future

We have always believed that you should have total control over your payments. You should be able to choose the providers that are best for you. And now that freedom is even more powerful because you can add an intelligent defense layer, built right into the platform. 

Our vision for the future is simple: we are going to continue to make your life easier. By making this essential layer of fraud orchestration available to you, you get more flexibility while also achieving the type of security that helps you sleep at night and keeps your business growing. 

Dodgeball’s core technology, as well as their team, will also allow us to accelerate our own AI and open payments vision, providing us with the tools, expertise, and knowledge to get there faster. 

The future of payments is one in which you can innovate, scale, and grow your business with complete confidence and Dodgeball is going to be a huge part of that as we move forward. 

Download the Payments Orchestration eBook Below