Kount Reviews

We mainly use Kount for fraud prevention.

Our finance team uses this solution. I am a fraud and chargeback analyst.

Right now, because of the pandemic, we are not really expanding our usage with Kount, but there is definitely room for growth.

We avoid losses in multiple ways with Kount. We prevent bad actors from purchasing products, whether it be a digital product, physical product, or even a service. A system like Kount allows us to see all the relevant information surrounding the person performing the transaction. We can assess if they're legitimate or fraudulent and prevent them from purchasing the service or product. 

In general, the amount of data that is available and on display all at once as you are looking into a specific transaction, including email addresses, names, and IP addresses — it's pretty amazing. It's an in-depth, all-in-one solution.

I would say it depends from company to company and how they are integrated; however, the rule system and automation could be expanded a little bit more. Some of the variables that we can see when reviewing a transaction are not available when creating a rule.

There could also be more variables that we could actually see when looking at the transaction model. It would be nice to be able to use all of them. 

The linked network accounts connected to the specific transactions — It would be nice to be able to use that information in rules.

I have been using this solution for over five years.

Stability-wise, it's great. I've used it every day for five years, it's been very consistent and reliable. Stability-wise, I would give it a rating of 10 out of 10.

It's definitely scalable. The company I have been working for has been growing constantly with no issues. Once it's set up, within the first week you can begin preventing fraud.

The support has been great. They are easy to get a hold of and they always respond within a matter of minutes with good advice. 

Positive

At my old company, I used to use a tool called Sift. It's another great tool, but I prefer Kount.

The major differences between the two solutions are how they're laid out and how fast you can gather as much information as possible. I personally prefer Kount — that's my personal preference. I've worked with both platforms for many years. I personally prefer Kount for the way that they display information and for the variety and flexibility they offer when it comes to the rules — from very simple to very complex.

Kount is better designed for catching fraud, detecting fraud, and preventing fraud. Sift is also great; you will not go wrong if you go with Sift, but I personally prefer Kount.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. It was integrated before I started working for the company. 

When it comes to the rules, we need to perform maintenance — which is one of my duties.

The figures have been great.

I think the pricing is great — I think it's totally worth what they're charging because the benefits are great.

If you recently purchased this solution, then you made the right choice. Just get the resources that you need to integrate the software and then hand it over to the people that have experience with it to work with it. You need somebody who is capable of understanding numbers and data. That's who you want to work with. If you get the right type of people, then you can get the best results and the company will benefit greatly — that's my advice. Complete the integration and then get somebody who can manage the software. 

You need someone with experience, you need to see things happening. You need someone who has a couple of years, or at least one year of experience using it every day, creating rules, reviewing documents; they need to be capable right away. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Kount a rating of nine — there is still some room for improvement. I have used a lot of proprietary tools, but Kount is probably the best. Overall, it's been great.

I don't remember every single use case. There were some 13+ cases. I don't know if you know the Intuit payroll system, we acquired it from a company called Paycycle. Paycycle was pretty good in that it was generating a few hundred million dollars per year as revenue. And that's what prompted Intuit to buy payroll. It's an old application, from the late nineties, when Java was proven to be one of the top technologies for building enterprise applications. We had the state of the art technology, which was used in the early 2000s which is the JSF-JSP.

Of course, we have now moved to a lot of other things that are as good as GraphQL and other JavaScript technologies, such as React. React is what we moved on to, but quite a lot of our applications still run on the old one. I've been out of the company since last year, but I'm sure they would have moved everything to React. The work which I did was for integrating the Kount JavaScript frame into the JSP and JSF's. That was my role. It took us all the way. It takes a while. So assume that I'm working for you and you are a small business owner. You've trusted me and I'm running your business and I want to move money out of your bank account to some bank account of my friend which is a standard account. So I have the admin privilege and I make the system add a bank account. I want to make sure that for today's payroll I move about $10,000 and I want to run away.

I think Kount has the means to check if this guy can actually add a bank account, modify, and delete. I don't think deletion is such a serious thing, but it includes bankaccount, deletion, addition, and modification. Especially modification considering these two use cases. 

Across the application, you may have payroll integrated with QuickBooks online accounting system. That's a different type of payroll, the way they interact is different, and there is a stand-alone payroll, and for some reason, users love it a lot. They want stand-alone payroll so that the kind of UI pages are different.

There is another use case: Even the agents can do fraud. So for agents, there was a separate system. Across these three different vertical flavors of Intuit payroll, the first one was with a few cases about banker forms. The second was about running a payroll. Even with running payroll, there are PMs who have the kind of experience with payroll. They come up with what use cases are most important. 

Running payroll is another one. Even in the back-end, there was something that involved Interact, anything and everything about moving money and modifying accounts. Even employee addition is a very sensitive thing. Employee addition and employee modification. Sometimes people simulate that I'm monitoring this employee little by little and there is a lot of fraudulent activity. There can be anything and everything. I had 12 or 13 different use cases when I worked across the three verticals in the field.

There were other competing systems which were there. There were other people and other departments using other software, but Kount stood out in payroll because it was already proven and even payments division was using it. Kount was the best at the time that I was working with it.

I was working with the UI integration part. I have an understanding of what happens in the background as a black-box. I mark transactions as good or bad and I posted on the back-end for them to look at this information to do the first thing. It's very critical. There are a lot of complaints and government laws around this so if I can't generate my paycheck at 3:00 PM for you, it's perfectly okay. But I want to get the check by 3:30 and if it doesn't happen, if the guy takes a different route, then we have a problem and there are a lot of complaints. We faced something like this in 2015 or 2016, I believe.

So it's pretty critical that the work that they do is of good quality in the end. If you do something wrong, you should be able to discover that. Coming back to the features, the intelligent JavaScript integration is something that I liked. I think a year later, 2018, we didn't have Kount for the mobile applications. So the mobile team was totally different, I had to educate them. I had to tell them what happened. I didn't actually know the value of Kount. I didn't realize it until three, four months later. I realized that the value Kount adds is very good and I was able to showcase this work quite to a lot of people, and educate people in the mobile division.  I liked the work. It's not just its features but also the work was very interesting.

In terms of what could be improved, that's a very good question. There was this layer you had to go to where I think we needed to add the frame. Then there is one turn for communication that happens with us and Kount and the response comes back again. So the time that is taken to go to Kount and come back should be in the order of around 100 milliseconds or less. And our context was taking around 200 to 300 milliseconds. We didn't want the extra load of 100 milliseconds to happen, so if the two rounds of stability could be cut to one, that would be very helpful. That was very relevant for the mobile app.

I was totally engaged in work with Kount for six months. I would say it took about a week or a week plus to get a grasp of it. Then there was some work experimenting which was done for another two weeks to know whether this works or not. So I'd say a month. And then you actually start coding and doing experimenting, that's a month and you work with the QA and then you educate them on what has been tested and how it has been tested. Luckily they got a very very good, skillful person who was very cooperative. So that took about four months to stabilize, and after roughly two months or so we were in production to make sure that everything is okay and it's actually usable by the analytics team, how much fraud we are preventing, and how much money we have paid for the company. It took about six months.

In terms of scalability, I would say that depends on Kount's back-end capacity and what payroll was assigned. If you have 100,000 users using payroll and all of them come on and add an account, everyone invariably goes through the screening process for whether they are allowed to or not. I think it was smooth. Otherwise, we would've had no updates, right? With performance and different aspects, every time a user gets to call the production server there is latency induced because of very poor upgrades, and bad experience. But we didn't have any kind of bad experience reported at all. We didn't have anything.

Initially, I had to interact with people. Whenever we used to have any kind of issues, there was this product manager cum technical person and he was pretty good and knowledgeable. I remember tracking quite a lot with this guy.

We had some trouble and there were some misunderstandings. After a few months, we had this genius discover that we were doing something wrong, that the requirements were wrong. We were posting duplicates to the code in the backup. This information of the unique string was not useful for them and the back-end had trouble identifying who was doing it, which is some kind of mapping issue. I remember working every day for a week or two and that was good. The tech support worked.

The initial setup was absolutely straightforward. Within a week I was fully working and within one day I could set up the demo. I liked that initial experience of setting things up. If data is bad then you have back-end problems and things won't work. But with Kount it is pretty good. I was able to create a demo and then in one day, from the point where I looked at the first URL, I was able to set it up immediately. And they had a QA URL which you connect with  and it performs within a day or so.

If it were 2017 or 2018 I would have definitely recommended it. There were other departments in it. A lot of my colleagues said they were using other systems. One name came up frequently that I don't recollect. I wondered why they were not using Kount. There might be some other reasons, though I don't think there is any technical problem. I enjoyed the work. I didn't have any complaints and there were no performance issues except which were for the most part induced by having external problems.

After doing everything, I needed to have some credit for the work. So I used to get statistical data from the risk management team and the product managers were asking how Kount was. They used to say that so many millions of dollars were saved. They definitely came back and gave this feedback. It helped pay a lot of money for a pickup.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate Kount a nine.

Kount is a better solution for us because they are really focused on maximizing sales. A lot of the other proposals that we saw were very focused on automation, machine learning, and driving down the chargeback rate. Of course, that's one goal, but it needs to be a balance between the two, between minimizing your chargeback and your risk but then also enabling as many sales as possible. If I wanted to minimize my chargebacks, I could just turn away and decline a lot of good sales. We need that balance. Kount did the best job marketing and highlighting that it was a solution where they offer AI and machine learning but it's within their tools that if you want to automate things, you can. We took the approach of automating something but we really thought that the human component was important for us to be able to manage the different levels of fraud.

Kount helped us position ourselves in a way where we could use humans. The humans could leverage the technology that Kount provided and are able to adapt and customize it to our needs. We could constantly change things and change the scoring. There's a robust offering of the different things that you can do with Kount whether you want a scoring model with different weights or you want to just set up a ruleset that automates things. The flexibility was what we really enjoyed. It grew over time with us because we started with them around about eight years ago now and so their tool also evolved immensely. They're very clear about their roadmap, they provide updates, and they're always striving to be better. Their focus on sales enablement was just as important as minimizing fraud and chargebacks. Whereas a lot of the other providers were just focused on minimizing fraud.

Kount enabled us to reduce our false positives by around 45% for fraudulent transactions, both false positives and false negatives. It helped us determine, make better decisions across the board, and protect our business and our integrity with our customers. We weren't insulting customers or turning good customers away.

We were also able to reduce our manual review rate exponentially. When we first started with them, our manual review rate was something crazy, like 55%, and Kount brought that down to 25%. From 25%, most recently, we were down to 4%. Over the course of those years, it was around 55%, 56% all the way down to 4% which was incredibly helpful for us. That's obviously a huge decrease in the workload.

The customizable rules are just as important because it overlaps with the user-defined field where you can make them very specific to your business. You can alter them and edit them, turn them on, turn them off, whenever you'd like. You can even get it down to almost a scheduling tool where you can say, "Okay, on Monday through Friday, run this rule. Friday to Sunday, run this other rule set." And so you can manage the different fraud trends that you're seeing that way. It helps you keep your manual overview rate as low as possible.

Another great feature is their ability to integrate with other third-party solutions like Ekata and Chargebacks911. Ekata is an ID verification and they all integrate together so you can just click on a link and all of your transaction data is automatically populated. Kount a very inclusive solution with a lot of different features.

The most valuable feature is its ability to create your own ruleset and edit it whenever you want. Their reporting functionality is very helpful. It's really robust.

There's a feature that's user-defined fields where it allows you the option to customize your needs. If I had a specific field that wasn't integrated initially from the standard data points that Kount requires, there might be different companies that have different data points in their order management systems that aren't universal. They're very specific to the business and Kount has user-defined fields where it's very easy for your internal development team to use the user-defined field and filter in whatever data point you want. You can get very granular into the specific needs that you need in the trends that you're seeing for fraud.

They could do a little bit better with chargeback management. There are other solutions out there that I've heard about, like Accertify that have a better chargeback platform where they're integrated more with the banks or in terms of how the workflow is and how you can respond to chargebacks. From my experience, Kount doesn't really have that. They had a way to assign reason codes and descriptions to the chargebacks so you can run reporting. You can flag transactions that get chargebacks on them so that you can then report your chargeback trends and create rulesets around them but there wasn't much for actual chargeback management. That was a whole separate process that we had to have in place.

They should have more dashboards for data visualization. They have some capabilities there, but you really have to be a pro user. You have to be an expert user to really use it at the highest level. Otherwise, you're just exporting the data and creating it in Excel and using those visuals. It would be nice if they had some out-of-the-box dashboards where could you sign in, go to your specific dashboard and it just tell you everything in an intuitive way. That's a key area that they could work on a little bit more. The technology is there, it's a great solution, but as far as communicating the performance of the fraud department, they could make the dashboards more intuitive and insightful.

Kount does a good job of communicating when they're going to be performing maintenance and that's usually during non-peak times. Other than that, we did have some challenges at the beginning where their reporting functionality was really slow. And there's a latency time. I'm on the East coast and the reporting happens on the Pacific Time, so it's three hours earlier, and there's also a random latency time where sometimes we have to wait. Our team had to wait four hours before we could be confident in the numbers and so that was a little bit challenging. Directionally, the reporting was always correct but it wasn't exact. That would be one unfortunate thing that they could focus on.

As far as the reliability and stability of the tool itself, I can't recall a time that it ever went down. It was always able to handle our peak volume times during key retail sales holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It was able to take on an exponential increase in transaction volume. It was the reporting functionality that was a little bit lagging at times. They did do an overhaul where they tried to improve that performance and it did help. It still wasn't 100% exactly what I would have loved to have seen, but it was nice to have a little bit of an improvement to begin with.

It definitely is scalable. Especially as a platform, we would implement new clients and onboard new clients and we never had a problem scaling. There was even an option that was very straightforward for us to either have some clients on our platform. We did their fraud management for them and other clients but they wanted to do their fraud management in-house. And so some clients would roll up under a parent account for Kount. Kount made it very easy to break other clients into their own individual instances. It's very flexible, very accommodating, and very easy to scale.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The technical people provided the appropriate documentation. Even after the initial setup, throughout our relationship with them, they would always make sure that they communicated when certificates needed to be updated or if we weren't on the certificate model and we moved to a better API connection. If anything needed to be updated, they were always really good at communicating that. The initial setup seemed to be a really straightforward process. It was a little bit unique for our use case just because we were a platform provider. At the time, Kount was used to working with individual retailers. We were one partner of theirs that was bringing multiple customer accounts to them through us. It was a little bit of a unique use case. The implementation, it didn't go beyond scope. It was right on time, on budget. They're really customer-focused. They have wonderful account managers there and they're a pleasure to work with.

Our strategy was to scope out the projects and get an understanding from Kount exactly what was required of us. Our development team worked it into their specific sprints, but it only took about two or three sprints. We have two-week sprints so I don't think it took any longer than three sprints for us to integrate, test, and be fully live in production. They do have a nice sandbox environment. The great thing about Kount is that you can set your ruleset in production as test rules. You don't have to do everything in testing and then replicate it over to production. After the initial implementation, when you make changes, you can do everything in production, as long as the initial integration is set up. 

We have 100% seen ROI. It's paid dividends over what we've invested just because it helped us quickly identify our areas of fraud and where we were being the most impacted and losing money. They helped us put parameters in place that stopped the flood gates. It stopped us from losing money. We started doing business smarter and saving good customers, boosting our sales, and minimizing the fraud at the same time. Kount is absolutely worth the investment.

Pricing is very realistic. We were a platform provider. When we started, we had a normal account setup that a normal retailer would have. As we grew over time, we actually expanded to their partner portfolio, meaning that we were bringing them a lot of business as a platform provider ourselves. So we benefited from the increase in transaction volumes across so many clients that it had helped us cost-wise. We had a higher volume so our transaction fees were pretty low.

Overall, the pricing is very reasonable especially for the value that they bring. They do a wonderful roadshow every year and they come to your location or major citiy. They also do a great data conference. 

My advice would be to make sure when you're going through the proposal process to outline certain use cases that are specific to your business. I'd also suggest trying to speak with other customers that Kount has on their platform that are in the same industry as you. 

Try to connect and reach out to them, because Kount does a really good job but they work with so many different industries that you want to make sure that they're specific to your business and that your pain points will be addressed. 

They do a good job covering all of their bases. It's really just about if there are specific pain points that are particular to your business or your industry, make sure that you get some very valid examples to show how they're solving them.

I would rate Kount a nine out of ten.