Fraud, Phishing and the Point of Sale

you know Ryan sometimes when we talk to these brands and businesses you know one of the first curiosities that come up for them is you know what's happening in this space what if someone gets a hold of my phone number right or gets a hold of one of my customers phone numbers and so we get different questions around like fishing or you know fraud prevention and protection you have a lot of experience with building not only fraud protection but prevention and how are you thinking about building that in in into Whym and in the space in general it's very clear that this has been a

problem for a very long time especially in SMS because SMS you know at the deepest layer transmits everything in plain text across the entire and everyone who intercepts that message gets to record the contents and so everyone I mean there's there's every layer of the stack someone is trying to solve this problem in a variety of different ways Apple was one of the first who said hey we're going to encrypt the message one before it leaves your phone and the people who receive it are also going to get it encrypted but then they only they can read it right but that only works from an

Apple phone to an Apple phone and that's iMessage that's iMessage Google is now finally supporting that same feature like my wife and i on a google phone can talk to each other today and have the same capability yeah but most of our contacts can't and especially the ones that are on iPhone will never have that cross communication so they're not solving it for everybody the carriers are also trying to find ways to address the situation there's a lot of situations around managing the brand's phone number making sure that the brand's phone number is never stolen making sure all messages coming from the brand's number are

actually from the brand they're working in that space quite a bit and then protecting the consumer we've heard a lot of horror stories about like the consumer's phone number being stolen a kid getting on your phone and using your phone as if they're you variety of spaces and so there are in this you know in no time in our history have we ever been as secure as we are now we've done a lot as a as a society to solve a lot of these problems but some of them still exist and so Whym has a role to play in how we also help you secure

everything that you're doing in particular the most important thing we need to first solve is making sure that we never take your card information in a way that could ever get it stolen so we always always always do that in an internet browser meaning do not text us your credit card phone number credit card number and we will never we'll never take it that way and we'll never ask you for it that way of course and you know there there are systems actually um that can be on the networks watching messages going across that can say did that look like a credit card to me

and you can try to stop those messages from going through but those are not going to save you from everything that's nothing that Whym can provide we're not the messaging provider we're just doing so this is just about something that we're doing so we're doing so this is one of the credit card number and we will never we'll never take it that way we'll never ask you for it that way of course and you know there are systems actually that can be on the networks watching messages going across that can say did that look like a credit card to me and you can try to

stop those messages from going through but those are not going to save you from everything that's nothing that Whym can provide we're not the messaging provider but that is something that people should know you know I mean if any experience ever asks you to share a credit card number or don't send it over the right don't text it to somebody DM over Instagram don't send it this is a free tidbit today and some of these providers are trying to help make sure that if you accidentally do that that won't actually get through which is but which is really cool but you know that's not what

women's solving women is solving let's get that card for a transaction on any channel we're not we don't we don't actually participate in messaging itself and so we have key places where we play to make sure that we get your card safely into the vault and then we never ask for it again if we don't have to you know there are key moments you know even when you use Apple occasionally it re-ask you for like your three-digit code on your yeah it's right just to revalidate who you are make sure that you still have control of the card and you've still control this device but

we have this kind of three-tier relationship that we take when we're taking your card we look at who you are we look at the device you're using and we look at the card that you're giving us at that moment and we and we only ever reuse that payment credential if all three things match up in each of those transactions if there's ever a moment when it's still you and it's still the same car but you're on a different device you'll have to re-enter information with us just to verify that you are who you say and then we're the ones actually tying that to the mobile

number exactly really important to know right because you've got a lot of different you know for example with I think still with Shopify right and like I can't I think it's at Shopify's checkout I can still enter 10 zeros right as your phone number yeah or I can enter my mom's phone number yeah you know and it's not going to authorize my payment and so one of the unique decisions that I think Whym has done is we've used the mobile number as a unique ID yeah our initial intention of doing that was to eliminate usernames and pass passwords are my nemesis everyone hates that's right

you know throw the spreadsheet away and whatever I've just used my mobile number and that's I hope you're not using spreadsheets no I'm just joking I have a binder no I'm joking but I think you know we initially wanted to use that for the convenience for the customer and so it's turned out that a lot of big brands have also made that decision right Uber and I think PayPal's got that everyone's making Amazon we did that pretty early on is actually how we built our database which I think was you know a great decision because it really was a consumer centric decision so we're tying

that payment information together with your mobile phone number one thing that we like to say is this now allows you to take your mobile phone number and in our environment in a safe way to pay for stuff exactly and not only pay for stuff but now collect things into a cart that you can consider for later so talk to me a little bit about how Whym operates as the point of sale not needing these integrations which we talked about before you know what's our job or what's our role in that in that journey yeah there's there's a lot of we get into around how we

technically do it the the most important thing that brands need to understand is that we're taking advantage of technologies that have been in the market forever that allow us you know one of the most important ones being the in-app web browser that exists on every messaging platform that's ever existed like I personally helped get it into snapchat but it's on Instagram it's on your text messaging thread it's in drift discord you name it there's a web browser actually one even in my my pre-installed messaging exactly on your phone exactly which I know which I never realized if I just hit back the back in it

takes you right back to the messaging yeah it doesn't seem that way sometimes when you're on an iPhone in particular it kind of feels like you're not in an internet browser but you totally are and my hope in the future right is that we get more embedded encrypted experiences right inside of messaging well you're gonna find is that especially you know Google will probably drive drive this faster than Apple will but you'll find that really the best technology for allowing third parties to do transactions and technologies and secure communications and things like that inside of other channels is actually the web browser and there's little

in-app browsers everywhere and you can't even tell they're there a lot of times but they're in use because they allow third parties to kind of play roles in the technologies that you're using and you know everyone has to have them they're they're a critical piece of the infrastructure every phone provider has worked for years and years and years to get them in there and they're by the today they're more secure than they've ever been and you very very I mean I can't even remember an article in the past five years where some serious fraud happened because of it because they've put a lot of effort

into trust into making that a trustworthy space and it's being used by every company you can imagine to do a lot of things and we've got a ton of our brands and businesses actually leveraging that in-app you know mobile browser to convert their customers into a text message thread right because you can take Whym's smart link and you can use that as a part of your swipe up text to buy offer text to buy cart text to buy collection and so they're living as a part of that experience in the ad stack right or as a part of that experience for swipe up and also

you know I think these brands are looking to sidestep the website by trying to get customers to again that decision or that intent to buy a lot a lot faster so they're embedding them in their link in bio tools like link tree and beacons and who be and so you know we're kind of seeing these types of speed it up process you know speed it up tools to kind of go over top of the actual websites yeah I mean what they're trying to do is they're saying hey look I know my website doesn't convert very well I know that Facebook wants me to pay 56

times before I get every sale I want to get that customer out of this channel and into a channel where I can talk to them directly without the middleman and so they're trying to find ways to do that and Whym is saying we're gonna find really innovative ways to do that for you but they've got to be very cautious about their strategy for that because if they do it incorrectly then they're gonna get that stop message that they really don't want that's right customer and so Whym is helping these brands make that conversion to the new channel in very unique and subtle ways that really

help the customer feel comfortable and safe the whole time but meanwhile helping the brand you know increase the ROI of that first impression and not require them to make so many more impressions to get that customer that's right we're building some really unique experiences I'm super excited to talk about in the future that allow us to capture that intent to buy but still allow the customer to continue you know on that experience that they're having consuming content and you know the great thing about the conversion which I know we're working on too is once you convert that customer out of that channel if you think

about paying 56 times to get an impression to that customer the average impression is a dollar 14 on Instagram right if you get that customer into a text message channel you can now market to them for a penny right you just cut your cost to 1 100th of what you would normally be paying which again is why these channels have become so important for engagement you know interacting between customers and and brands and their customers and it just makes a ton of sense from an efficiency standpoint and a monetary standpoint right when I first came to participate with this company at all I was nervous

about this as a story because I don't want anyone messaging me except for my wife you know and and but yeah I was watching you use your messaging application to talk to a variety of brands all day long and going well clearly there's an audience here of people who want this to work but you really do make need to make good decisions about how you're going to engage those audiences if you do it right the way that you guys have been doing it you know we have 25 plus thousand shoppers who are like would love to hear from us tomorrow that's right and that's because

we know that or they know that we're treating them the way that they want to be treated in this space and they love how we're doing it and as that audience grows it's going to be incredible that's right and women's really you know we're taking on that responsibility of being that point of sale right establishing that trust and that confidence for the next generation of consumers who you know they don't have the same you know they don't have the same experiences that we had for the last 15 years right they think about the convenience of buying something where they're interacting directly with a brand we

saw that at snapchat right messaging was a really important screen there and really drove the daily active use and I know that both you and I are big believers that messaging is going to drive monetization in a major way I agree yeah 100% well Ryan thank you so much for spending this time with me I really appreciate it and it's been really fun to talk about the fintech landscape great cool all right we're good that's it