Incognia Verifies Couriers and Customers Playing Identity Fraud Whack-A-Mole
Home Depot heads to Uber Eats and DoorDash, Walmart GoLocal partners with IBM, Deliveroo finishes 2024 strong
We’re getting back to delivering all your favorite industry news, after resting our key-clackin’ for the holidays. To kick things off, Jonah Bliss sat down with André Ferraz, Co-Founder and CEO of Incognia. Fraud prevention and identity verification has become a growing concern for delivery and mobility platforms, with 3PDs like Grubhub turning to his Palo Alto-based startup to make sure customers and couriers really are who they say they are. With competitors like Uber also strengthening their verification procedures, this felt like a perfect time to learn more about the cat and mouse game that’s becoming all the more difficult for deliverers.
Before we get to that, we’ve also got some big news from Home Depot, Walmart GoLocal and Deliveroo; let’s get to the week’s biggest stories!
Today’s edition is brought to you by Curbivore 2025: returning to DTLA, April 10-11.
Today:
Home Depot Adds DoorDash and Uber Eats
Walmart GoLocal Adds IBM Sterling
Chart Time | Deliveroo Finishes Strong
Incognia’s André Ferraz Is Fighting Food Fraud
PARTNERSHIPS | Home Depot Heads to Uber Eats & DoorDash
America’s largest home improvement chain is making a big 3PD push, as The Home Depot has just gone live on both DoorDash and Uber Eats. DoorDash is celebrating the addition of the Georgia-based retail giant’s 2,000+ storefronts with 40% off orders of $35+.
The Big Picture: For HD, this is all about growing distribution channels, after a few years of lackluster gains to ecommerce sales. "We’ve never been faster or more efficient at delivering the products our customers need through HomeDepot.com,” said Jordan Broggi, executive vice president, customer experience, and president of online at The Home Depot. “Our expanded e-commerce capabilities make it easier than ever to shop and receive your order when and where you need it. UE and DD join Instacart, which has had a deal with the Depot since last May. Pricing across platforms is competitive: 75 Clorox wipes are $7.69 on DD and on IC, but a penny cheaper on UE; HomeDepot.com offers them for just $7.28 but then adds on $2.99 for same-day delivery.
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INTEGRATIONS | Walmart GoLocal Goes Live on IBM Sterling
Walmart GoLocal, the retail heavyweight’s white-label delivery platform, is now integrated into IBM’s popular Sterling Order Management system. When a customer places an order and it’s ready to ship, IBM’s order management system allows for the selection of a delivery service provider, now including Walmart GoLocal’s suite of delivery capabilities including same-day, next-day, multi-day, scheduled, batched deliveries and big & bulky. Sterling’s users include Hudson Bay / Saks Fifth Avenue, jeweler Pandora, Eileen Fisher and DHL.
The Big Picture: Walmart has been making a big push to integrate GoLocal into a number of ordering software suites, including a partnership with Salesforce Commerce Cloud in 2023. The delivery platform is making in-roads with retailers grumbling about rising costs at UPS and FedEx, while offering delivery options nearly as quick as white label offerings from Uber and DoorDash.
CHART TIME | Deliveroo Returns to Growth in ‘24
Deliveroo posted some strong results to wrap up the year, with GTV up 6%, and its home turf of UK & Ireland looking more robust than international markets. Monthly active consumers also grew mildly after shrinking in ‘23.
INTERVIEW | Incognia’s André Ferraz Wants to Restore Trust to the Gig Economy
Jonah Bliss: Let’s start with the basics: what is Incognia?
André Ferraz: Incognia is a fraud prevention company that focuses on developing solutions for companies in the gig economy. We’ve developed a digital identity solution that combines device fingerprinting, location analysis and tamper detection to identify suspicious account behavior and prevent fraud without adding any friction to the user experience.
Getting a bit more into the technical specifics – how does your product work to detect fraudulent account behavior?
Traditionally there have been two main identity verification methods. The first entails checking identity documents and ensuring that the information used to create accounts matches the provided documentation. A main problem with this approach is that the number of data breaches has increased so it is easier than ever before for a fraudster to create an account with stolen information. The second identification technique focuses on creating a unique ID for devices. While this approach has been popular for over a decade, it has vulnerabilities. Most notably, device and app manipulation methods, also called tampering, have become easier to use and more effective.
What makes Incognia’s identity solution different from others in the market is that we can identify users with high accuracy regardless of which account or device they are using. The unique data that we collect and process, such as indoor location data, enables us to identify bad actors with very high accuracy and prevent fraud. As an added bonus, it requires nothing from the user themselves. No password, no answer to a silly question.
Our technology is helping top food delivery companies save millions of dollars in fraud losses per month. For example, it can detect bad actors attempting to create fake accounts to accumulate and sell promotion codes. Or drivers attempting to share accounts with unauthorized individuals. Our technology can even detect when an account is being logged into by someone other than the account owner.
How do companies like Grubhub, and other 3PDs, incorporate your data? Can you give any specific examples?
Grubhub has partnered with Incognia to limit unauthorized account sharing and keep bad actors from gaming the system. Testing showed that our technology could actually increase order profitability by making sure that risky drivers were blocked from continuing to work on the platform using shared or fake accounts.
For other clients in food delivery we are preventing promotion and refund abuse on the consumer side. Promotion abuse might sound pretty harmless but we have seen cases in which a delivery company loses 85% of their promotion campaign budget to fraud. This is actually a relatively positive story because at least they identified the problem. Some other companies fall victim to an attack like this and don’t even realize. If marketing doesn’t collaborate with fraud prevention or track the right metrics they could be repeatedly pouring their marketing dollars into fraudsters’ pockets.
For the good fifteen or so years I’ve been tracking the sharing economy, user verification has been a big issue; do you see this working with other types of gig economy businesses?
Definitely, in fact we already have a ride-hailing platform and a vacation rental platform as customers. At their core, the challenges they face all come down to user verification. They have very similar root causes, for example not being able to re-identify the same user using device intelligence alone.
We have found that many large gig economy platforms try to build fraud prevention solutions in-house before looking externally. Since many of these platforms have strong technology-driven cultures, this isn’t surprising, but it makes even more sense when you realize that the only fraud solutions out there were developed for financial services, which has very different business dynamics.
Ultimately though, most of the companies we have spoken to realize that the numbers don’t work out in their favor. In order to build an effective fraud product they’d need to continue to invest in maintenance and development over the long-term, and that just doesn’t make sense when compared to the cost of a professional solution.
What was your path into the delivery technology world? Why solve this problem?
We initially launched in the US with our sights set on the financial services industry, given our success in Brazil. However, we quickly realized two things. One, the financial services industry has very long sales cycles which would make initial growth slower. And two, we learned that gig economy platforms were losing a significant amount of money to complex fraud challenges that our tech was uniquely positioned to solve.
The complexity is caused by the number of stakeholders. These platforms facilitate the interaction of three or more stakeholders during each transaction and they all have incentives to game the system, making detection of fraud and scams more difficult. Ultimately, it was a digital identity problem that we got really excited about solving because of its complexity, but we also saw how precise location analysis could play a very important part in solving it.
Trust and safety often feels like a game of whack-a-mole, with clever scammers quickly coming up with new workarounds as soon as companies shut down one attack vector. Do you have anything else up your sleeve for the next round of combat?
Any successful bad actor is constantly iterating to avoid detection and scale their scams. So as fraud prevention software developers, we also need to continue evolving our technology or we become irrelevant. More than half of the Incognia team are developers, and we have people constantly monitoring the dark web for new fraud techniques, allowing us to stay one step ahead of bad actors.
We actually just announced a new detection signal called Environment Linked to Fraud (ELF). It can determine whether a device is risky based on the activity of the other devices on the same indoor positioning signals. This is a game changer for the field of digital identity because it means that apps can now determine the riskiness of a brand new device before they allow them to create a new account. For the food delivery industry, this enables platforms to drastically reduce a bad actor's ability to create multiple fake accounts or steal accounts (what we call an Account Takeover.)
Q: Last but not least… where do you see the sector headed in the next few years?
A: Great question. I believe platforms in this space will start expanding horizontally. They will follow the super app model and try to become a one stop shop for their users. We have seen this happen with Gojek in South East Asia and Rappi in Latin America already. These apps build an incredibly loyal base of customers by going narrow and then start expanding beyond delivery altogether into areas like healthcare, payments and banking, until they are the only app a person needs. We will start to see US & European companies follow suit.
A Few Good Links
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