This is part of our ongoing customer stories series on how Fingerprint has helped our customer solve costly fraud issues, streamline visitor identification, and more. You can read all of our case studies here.

About Uni Cards 

Uni Cards is a fintech company that offers branchless credit cards with competitive cashback and additional rewards in addition to no international Forex markups with a mission to change how people interact with credit. By reimagining the existing credit products and delivering an unmatched credit experience to millions of Indians, Uni is disrupting how traditional credit card products work.

The Challenge

Uni Cards faced a serious account takeover issue in which bad actors would trick customers into sending their one-time passwords (OTPs) to them, giving them access to their accounts, which included personally identifiable information, including credit card and CVV numbers.

OTP (One-time Password) Requirements 

Financial regulations in India now require OTP for online financial transactions, so removing OTP for another authentication method was not an option. With frequent account takeover attacks, Uni Cards needed additional security methods to layer on top of their current OTP solution. 

Rising cost of fraud 

Before the implementation of Fingerprint, Uni Cards experienced close to 6.5 million Indian Rupees ($78K+ US Dollars) worth of fraudulent transactions due to successful account takeover incidents. This, coupled with the potential damages to their brand as a result, meant significant action needed to be taken to reduce account takeovers happening on their platform. 

Stunting growth of new products

Account takeover also seeped into other areas of Uni Card’s business, causing issues with new product development and growing the overall business. Uni Cash, a new product, no longer requires OTPs and saw an immediate influx of account takeover attempts as a result. 

Why Fingerprint

Uni Cards reached out to several identification vendors in an effort to add an additional layer of security on top of their OTP methodology, given the difficulties they were having with account takeover. The team at Uni Cards landed on Fingerprint after initial tests proved highly successful, stating the accuracy and short implementation time made Fingerprint a powerful solution. 

Uni Cards implemented Fingerprint’s visitor identifier for two separate fraud prevention projects to bolster their defense against account takeover. First, Uni Cards uses Fingerprint’s visitor identifier to identify devices customers use to download and sign up for their app. If more than two users come up for a single device, that device is automatically blocked. Daily, around 0.5% of customers, out of total users, who start onboarding get rejected, and there is less than a 1% false positive rate.

Secondarily, in the event that Uni Cards needs to attribute a unique device ID to a particular customer login or app launch, Fingerprint’s visitor identifier is used to identify both fraudulent actions and a genuine device ID. 

Results and Achievements 

Fingerprint allowed Uni Cards to add an additional layer of identification on top of their fraud tech stack, enabling them to reduce the amount of account takeover attempts and monthly fraud costs. 

Curbing account takeover attacks

Since incurring fraud losses of around 6.5 million rupees in one month, Uni Cards has yet to see another attack of that size and stated their fraud rates fall comfortably below what is considered industry standard.

Uni Card’s Product Manager Mayank Raguwashi attributes this as a direct result of Fingerprint:

The ability to accurately identify users and unique device IDs speaks a lot about the strong solution they have built.  

Freedom to scale and grow

With their fraud problems solved, Uni Card has launched several new products, enabling them to continue growing as a business and feel secure and in control of future fraud attacks. 

Conclusion 

Fingerprint proved to be the solution that Uni Cards needed to repel large instances of account takeover costing their business millions of Rupees per month. With Fingerprint’s 99.5% accurate visitor identifier and easy implementation, they were able to get up and running quickly and reallocate resources to grow and scale instead of constantly battling bad actors. 

Learn how Fingerprint can help your business stop account takeover today.