Since October of 2012, WePay's Veda has been leveraging social data to measure merchant risk. In that time, the company has been able to catch 300% more in attempted fraud. In just six months, the patent-pending technology behind Veda has stopped more than $30 million in attempted fraud.

Each year, fraudsters attempt to steal billions of dollars online -- costing payment companies, small businesses and consumers a lot of time and grief. By analyzing years of social data that is difficult to fake, WePay can more intelligently identify the bad actors.

Because Veda now provides these new protection capabilities, WePay does not need to use the traditional methods of freezing customer's money to defend against fraud losses, opening the doors to providing next day payments to its merchants. This constitutes the best payout policy in the industry for card-not-present merchants.

"In today's social data based world, we realized there was a tremendous opportunity to use this data to better assess the risk potential of our merchants and provide a better customer experience as well," said Bill Clerico, CEO of WePay. "A traditional credit score only shows a sliver of who you are, but online data paints a more complete picture and is more difficult to fake. This allows us to know our merchants better and get them their money faster."

WePay's groundbreaking technology, Veda, uses data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp coupled with proprietary algorithms to quickly mine and analyze a merchant's footprint and assess risk. Veda uses pattern recognition, integrated support data, and automatic cross-referencing based on just five fields of information to analyze risk and provide a better customer experience in the process.

Veda has a number of benefits for WePay's merchant community:

Faster sign-up
Veda only needs five pieces of information (versus the 21 some payment companies require) to get started: first name, last name, name of businlast name, name of business, email address, phone number
Faster approval
Thanks to Veda, WePay can have a small business ready to accept payments in under one minute -- as opposed to days
Faster payments to merchants
Many payment companies delay card-not-present payouts to small businesses by 30 days or more. WePay leads the industry in settlement time: 86% of our merchants receive their money the next business day, 97% receive it within one week.
Increased fraud protection
Veda has a proven track record of stopping fraudsters who impersonate or defraud small businesses

WePay's easy-to-use online payment tools for small businesses include a mobile application, online invoices, on-site checkout buttons, virtual terminal for charging credit cards, as well as an application programming interface (API) for partners. New customers can be up and running and accepting credit cards in under one minute.