Kount Competitors & Alternatives

Disclaimer: Everything you’ll read in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test every tool. This article was last updated in Q3 2023. Please feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.

Best Kount Alternatives 

What Does Kount Offer?

Kount, an Equifax company, is an established fraud prevention solution, which today protects more than 15,000 brands from around the world. Founded in 2006, it has over 15 years of experience, while the global Identity Trust Network database it taps into benefits from 13 years’ worth of data, featuring up to 32 billion interactions per year.

Kount Command is the brand’s flagship anti-fraud solution, employing artificial intelligence with both supervised and unsupervised machine learning.

It promises to reduce the risk of chargebacks, prevent friendly fraud, BOPIS fraud, gift card fraud and coupon abuse, among others, and provide a pleasant experience for all legitimate customers, minimizing churn.

Kount customers benefit from one-on-one training and around-the-clock support – although this is only in English, to the best of our knowledge.

At the time of writing, Kount’s suite of products includes:

• Kount Command – a digital fraud prevention tool
• Kount Control – focused on adaptive authentication and MFA
• Kount Central – anti-fraud solution for payment providers
• a dispute and chargeback management tool

The company also has a chargeback management platform, to solve disputes and return fraud, and a device fingerprinting module for software and hardware analysis. Meanwhile, some of Kount’s tech features are:

• event-based bot detection
• 32bn user interactions-per-year database
• policy and practice advice
• adaptive AI
• two types of machine learning

Why Look for a Kount Alternative?

Although Kount is a solid, established solution, there are several reasons why a Kount user might seek an alternative. 

When asked about any negatives to this vendor, customers have mentioned transaction loading times occasionally being slower than desired, as well as some Shopify restock bugs. Among existing users’ wishlists, we find more customization and better integrations – so, for such users, it might be worth checking out the competition.

In terms of the underlying technology, one concern is that because its vast Identity Trust Network database has been in use for over 13 years and is not live, some of the data will have become stale, and giving it as much weight as more recent (or, even better, live) data might not be ideal.

The lack of AML features could also be concerning if you need to remain compliant and want to avoid looking at an extra solution.

Finally, one might simply want to see what innovation has found its way onto the market in recent years, and whether it’s easier to use and customize – and perhaps more efficient – than their current solution.  

Five Kount Alternatives 

Far from when Kount released its first anti-fraud product in 2006, today there are several contenders available that might be worth your time.

Let us take a look at six of the most prominent.

SEON  

Features & Use Cases

Founded in 2015, SEON is the brainchild of Tamas Kadar and Bence Jendruszak, who developed the anti-fraud platform when they started looking for such a solution to cover the needs of their old startup – and realized there was nothing out there that fit their requirements. 

So, they decided to themselves create the anti-fraud solution they were looking for. Today, SEON has offices in London, Budapest, Jakarta, and Austin, Texas, recently completing an impressive series A investment round that raised €10/$11.3 million.

One of the tenets of SEON’s fraud prevention methodology is its reverse email and phone lookup module, which is available both for manual use in the form of a browser extension or API calls, and for automation and integration into the end-to-end fraud prevention platform, where it enriches data, enhancing accuracy and minimizing churn. 

In simpler terms, this allows organizations to use shoppers/visitors’ commonly provided information – email and/or phone number – to assess their risk rating, tapping into non-private, publicly available information from 90+ online platforms in order to reach conclusions about each user’s intentions.

On SEON’s 360-degree end-to-end anti-fraud platform, the above combines with IP and behavioral analysis, strong fingerprinting and velocity checks to deliver state-of-the-art fraud detection and prevention.

AML is also taken care of with a specific module designed to check the relevant lists, such as: PEP, sanctions and crime watchlists.

Whitebox machine learning taps into historical data to discover the optimal ruleset for each company, while there are also industry presets to get you started.

Sift

Features & Use Cases

One of the startups to have come out of the renowned Y Combinator, Sift was established in 2011 with the promise to “end digital fraud”, to use their own words.

Sift’s list of clients includes Twitter, Airbnb, Instacard, Hello Fresh and Wayfair. Certainly, being based in the US has helped this company land some impressive contracts. But what about the technology?

Digital Trust & Safety Suite is the name of the integrated anti-fraud solution on offer, promising to prevent loss and streamline operations. 

This solution stack features five of Sift’s flagship products, namely Payment Protection, Content Integrity, Account Defense, Passwordless Authentication, and Dispute Management which, together, seek to address some of the most common pain points online companies face today: chargebacks, promo abuse, fake accounts, ToC violations, transfer fraud, account takeover (ATO) fraud, etc. 

The monitoring console is user friendly and pleasant to navigate, while the Payment Protection product has received good reviews for its automated, real-time analysis that does the day-to-day heavy lifting, by using the global network to train the machine learning models. 

Overall, Sift is great for organizations with huge amounts of data to be monitored, but this company’s standalone tools do not integrate as easily with legacy and competitor products, which can cause issues when scaling up or out.

ThreatMetrix (LexisNexis)

Features & Use Cases

Now owned by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, part of the RELX Group, following its February 2018 acquisition, ThreatMetrix remains a strong, recognizable brand name in the fraud fighting industry. It boasts over 6,000 deployments around the world and advanced technology, and its main mission is authenticating digital personas and online transactions.

Among the industries ThreatMetrix serves are igaming, alternative payments, ecommerce and financial services including banking – but having started life back in 2005, the product has served several, diverse types of customers and sectors. LexisNexis also advertises separate ThreatMetrix for Healthcare, for Insurance and for Government products. 

As it stands, ThreatMetrix is a full anti-fraud solution for user identification and transaction authentication.

This is the sort of Kount alternative that seeks to provide ease of use and convenience, promising to recognize up to 95% of returning customers for frictionless transactions.

The machine learning models employed are whitebox, which is always a plus, and there is focus on behavior analytics, too. As for manual reviews, the dynamic decision platform promises to provide unique intelligence and holistic insights, to enable more accurate decisions.

However, as it often happens when innovative startups are acquired by larger companies, there are shortcomings as well as benefits. ThreatMetrix is now part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions and, as such, both provides easy integration with its other products, and does not play as well with solutions from other brands. Also, there is no built-in data enrichment and, at the time of writing, there is no free trial either, which can make it difficult to decide to invest. 

Emailage (LexisNexis)

Features & Use Cases

Founded in 2012 and eventually acquired by LexisNexis in February of 2020, Emailage has made a name for itself in the fraud fighting arena with a solution that uses shoppers’ email addresses to create profiles and block high-risk transactions. Today, it’s part of the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Network, with all the pros and cons that come from this type of arrangement. 

Emailage is a reverse email lookup and data enrichment tool that promises to keep fraudsters at bay via email, IP and behavior analysis.

To this end, machine learning, industry presets, risk scoring and custom rules allow for more accurate results. Simply put, what it does is use a shopper’s email to draw conclusions about them and stop bad actors from taking advantage of both your company and your customers.

Of course, as part of LexisNexis’s suite of products, Emailage is linked up to the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Network – a database consisting of fraud signals and various data, including email addresses, crowdsourced from the company’s clientele.

Fraudsters and scammers are likely to attempt their schemes with the same identity more than once, so anyone seen before on the 150+ country-wide network will be more easily identified. Per the official website, there are 5.9 billion digital identifiers in total, with 82,200 fraud events shared each day.

Because it relies on email, the Emailage solution is friction-free and makes for a smoother shopping journey. However, the information it relies on is not live, so there is the risk of stale data that delivers sub-par results. Further, the focus is on emails in particular, rather than additional points considered best practice and scrutinized by its competitors – for instance, phone numbers or IP addresses, or even fingerprinting modules.

Nethone

Features & Use Cases

Since 2016, when it was founded in Warsaw, Poland, Nethone has been making a name for itself as a business analysis and machine-learning-powered fraud prevention company. In the summer of 2021, they raised $6.7 million in a series A funding round.

Nethone battles fraud with Profiler, a module that gathers more than 5,000 attributes for each user session: information about the user’s device, network, location, behavior, keystrokes, etc.

This powerful fingerprinting technique delivers the flagship Know Your Users™ profiling technology. 

Not only do they promise to calculate an accurate user profile and risk score based on their fingerprinting algorithms but also the likelihood of chargeback and of friendly fraud, by discovering links between various data points and variables.

Account takeover protection and identity fraud detection are also covered by the Nethone offering, with the company claiming to “seamlessly stop” over 95.3% of ATO attempts. 

Although perhaps more limited in popularity than some of its competitors, Nethone has excellent customer reviews. The fact that machine learning engine results are provided with full reasoning is appreciated, as is the quick integration and third-party API plugins available.

On the flipside, areas of concern include the fact that the tool does not do data enrichment, nor are there risk scores provided. 

How to Choose a Kount Alternative

The short answer is: Consider your needs, then see which product(s) address them. The best Kount alternative entirely depends on what would work for you. 

There is no point signing up for a solution that is industry-leading at something that is not among your anti-fraud priorities. Hopefully, the product breakdowns we’ve presented above have given you enough information to start with. 

One piece of advice we will impart, however, is to try to get a demo of any product you are close to deciding on. It is important to try before you make a commitment – especially when it is so vital to your operations. 

FAQ

Further Reading

Learn more about:

Sift Alternatives | Feedzai Competitors | Threatmetrix Alternatives | Emailage Competitors

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