This year has been unexpected to say the least. As 2019 ended and business forecasts were written, no one would have ever guessed what was to come in 2020.

As consumer behaviors have shifted in uncertain times, merchants worldwide have quickly adapted and implemented new technologies, tools, and strategies to maintain business continuity and increase their online presence. Unfortunately, as online activity and e-commerce continues to rise, so does potential for exposure to fraud.

In this blog series, we will highlight some of the latest fraud-related events and issues on the rise in our digitized world, affecting individuals and businesses alike. Our goal is to better educate customers on what type of fraud can occur and how they happen, while sharing how solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection can help protect businesses from a similar attack. With the fraud landscape changing every day, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection strives to help businesses stay ahead of the game.

In this first installment, we will discuss the impact of account takeover (ATO) fraud, a type of identity fraud that can incur massive monetary losses for individuals and, for businesses, lost revenue and damaged reputations.

The impact of account takeover

In a world overflowing with technology and data, there is a constant challenge to protect that data from fraudsters. As software continues to evolve to protect information, so do fraudsters, requiring continuous improvement to security to prevent and identify breaches. For most people, this multi-billion dollar battle goes unnoticed unless they are directly impacted or a story of fraud hits the front page news.

So, what is account takeover? ATO is when a fraudster gains access to an account they don’t own, changes account information, and makes unauthorized transactions. It’s a type of fraud that can affect businesses small and large. ATO incurs tens of billions of dollars in fraud losses every year.

Fraud due to ATO is on the rise, growing faster every year as the world becomes more digitized. In 2017, ATO accounted for $5.1 billion in losses, and according to Juniper Research, online fraudulent transactions are expected to reach $25.6 billion in 2020.

ATO also occurs in the form of fraudsters taking over an account and making fraudulent purchases, or even open new accounts using the victim’s information. This crisis affects both the individual entity who has had their information stolen and the businesses the fraudsters interact with, resulting in United States businesses losing a reported $7 billion in 2019. Another issue with ATO is fraudsters are also taking over mobile phone accounts at an arming rate with 680,000 people falling victim in 2019, a rise of 78 percent from the previous year. ATO is a problem that needs to be addressed to help protect individuals and businesses alike, and luckily, solutions are available to prevent the devastating impacts.

How Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection can help prevent fraud

This is where Microsoft comes in, providing a solution to help protect businesses from fraudulent activity with the implementation of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. Recently awarded the Juniper cybersecurity platinum award, this suite of services enables users to gain access to Purchase Protection and two new capabilities, introduced in July 2020: Account Protection and Loss Prevention. The 2020 release wave 2 updates include better integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, among other updates for Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

• Account protection is where the solution to protect accounts from ATO comes into play. Account Protection from Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection safeguards against ATO with the use of adaptive AI technology, BOT protection, device finger printing, the fraud protection network, and account creation and sign-in protection. With these tools, businesses and their users can be better protected from fraudsters attempting an ATO, ultimately protecting sensitive information and the business’s bottom line.

While fraud continues to be on the rise each year, tools to help shield businesses from fraudsters are becoming more readily available. As solutions like Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection utilize the power of AI to continually improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their programs, they can help to better defend businesses against fraud and protect their revenue.

• Loss prevention helps protect your revenue by identifying potential fraud on returns and discounts arising from omnichannel purchases, enabling store managers and loss prevention officers to quickly take action to mitigate losses. Adaptive AI technology continuously learns and adapts from fraud patterns, working together with the fraud protection network to equip merchants with the tools they needed to optimize fraud controls related to discounts and returns.
• Purchase protection helps merchants protect online revenue by improving commerce transaction acceptance rates while reducing checkout friction and providing merchants with insightful tools to make decisions that appropriately balance revenue opportunity and customer experience verses fraud loss. The transaction acceptance booster enables merchants to share transactional trust knowledge with issuing banks to help boost authorization rates and reduce wrongful rejects, helping protect revenue streams. Read how Microsoft is teaming up with Capital One and American Express to battle fraudulent purchases. In the 2020 release wave 2, capability will be added to the transaction acceptance booster for merchants to enable sharing of additional contextual data. More coverage will also be added for merchants with additional partner banks.

Next steps

Learn more about our comprehensive fraud protection with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and stay tuned for the next blog post of our Fraud Trends Blog Series.

Questions? Please contact your Microsoft sales representative to learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities.

The post Fraud trends part 1: account takeover in a digitalized world appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

When building a marketing technology (MarTech) stack, both the best-in-breed and single vendor approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. Today’s business realities has marketing operations teams and business leaders re-examining the best way to get necessary tasks accomplished: “one-for-each” or “one-for-all”.

A changing landscape

Digital transformation is driving marketing leaders to make decisions between two competing approaches to building a marketing technology stack. On one side is best-of-breed, defined by Technopedia as “the best system in its referenced niche or category. Although it performs specialized functions better than an integrated system, this type of system is limited by its specialty area.” That second sentence contains the key appeal of best-of-breed (BoB), the belief that selecting individual vendors for essential functions delivers better performance than an integrated system. Many companies have bought into that view.

A survey of more than 300 marketing, sales, and advertising professionals by business-to-business (B2B) marketing agency Walker Sands reports that the best-of-breed strategy has been gaining popularity over the last decade and commands more than 40 percent of their respondents’ marketing stack. That tilt is in some ways caused by the BoB message that single-vendor solutions do not offer superior quality appsan assertion that is now being challenged.

The single-vendor solution

Today’s integrated enterprise solution is focused on the capabilities and usability of its apps, as well as the advantages of choosing a single vendor. Usually offered as a comprehensive, integrated software suite that uses one data mart, this approach provides the implementation, operational, and training advantages of single-source integration as well as features and capabilities of specific products that are competitive with a BoB offering. The question of whether the ease of use, capabilities, and business value of its individual products can equal the value of their best-of-breed counterparts is the key consideration when deciding which path to follow.

The power of the single-vendor shared platform

TPC Logistica Inteligente (TPC), one of the main logistics operators in Brazil, depends on a complex corporate sales process with cycles that last on average eight months and involve several areas of customers. When the company’s main need was the implementation of a robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool, after a detailed analysis of the main solutions on the market, TPC opted to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, which share a common platform.

Following a thorough implementation plan presented by Microsoft and its partner Inove, TPC completed the adoption in less than two months. For a company that makes approximately three million deliveries a year, the implementation aspect of the product “was important and decisive,” says Silas Faria, Innovation Manager, TPC.

The speed and smoothness of the implementation was the beginning of fast-tracking impact of Dynamics 365 on TPC. With Dynamics 365 Marketing in operation, TPC was able to instantly start tracking mail and phone and qualify its customers. This breakthrough enabled TPC to improve customer relationships and increased the company’s visibility in its market.

With Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales natively aligning with each other and the engineering advantage of an adaptable shared platform, TPC saw how it could readily integrate additional Microsoft solutions, creating, in effect, a “best-of-breed” solution that shared a common data model and the Dynamics 365 customer engagement platform. The best of both approaches.

Building out to build business

Choosing Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales created opportunities to smoothly integrate additional Microsoft solutions as well as an array of ISV third-party solutions. TPC now feeds its data into Microsoft Power BI dashboards to acquire insights to support decision-making. The company used Microsoft Power Apps to create an application that combines business data with information on available storage space in its distribution centers.

For TPC Group, Dynamics 365 is a “best-of-the-best” solution. Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales have transformed its understanding of its customers. Power BI and Power Apps improved how information is gathered, analyzed, and used to grow business. “We have gained speed, process quality, and strategic management,” observes Eduardo Leonel, Commercial and Marketing Director, TPC. All accomplished with the single-vendor Dynamics 365 solutions and platform. Further, TPC has an easy path to adding other Dynamics 365 applications for customer engagement, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consumer Insights and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

The impact of choosing Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales is impressive. TPC’s decision has triggered a significant increase in the company’s conversion rate: it added 16 new, highly-complex projects in 2019 compared to only two in the previous year.

Seeing the path forward clearly

The integrated solution promises quicker and smoother integration and deployment in a competitive business environment that doesn’t tolerate slow reactions or performance disruptions. And in the case of the Dynamics 365 solutions, it brings the same drive as a BoB company has to be the best in each product category.

Muddying the waters is the disruptive action of some larger single-vendor suite providers to augment their solutions by acquiring their BoB competitors. On the surface, this would appear to present a “best-of-both-worlds” option, but integration obstacles still exist within this hybrid approach, particularly in the challenge of seamlessly connecting applications that originated with different vendors.

While Dynamics 365 is a single-vendor solution that is easy to configure, use, and extend, it also offers BoB advantages. The Dynamics 365 applications are built upon an adaptable, expandable platform and a common data model that unifies data across all your business processes and enable interoperability among apps.

At the same time, each Dynamics 365 application teamincluding Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Financeis focused on engineering a best-of-breed level performance. For example, Dynamics 365 Marketing provides a powerful combination of marketing automation with events management, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights integration, a connector to LinkedIn, and AI-based capabilities. Aligned marketing and sales applications from Dynamics 365 can help companies understand customers better, collaborate remotely, optimize buying processes, and adapt to rapidly changing environment.

The choice for many companies, particularly those with ambitious growth plans, may be a single-vendor consistency that encompasses an array of best-of-breed products. Having to choose between the two alternative approaches could be a thing of the past.

Learn more

Learn more about how the combination of powerful, fully featured Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, and other Dynamics 365 solutions can meet these challenging times.

• Gain an overview into Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.

The post Why you should select an integrated platform for MarTech needs appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.