Fernando Lopez has been appointed as the new global director of issuer channel development at Ethoca, a fraud intelligence and card acceptance real-time information provider.
Lopez’s role will be to encourage global card issuing processors and outsourced service providers to join Ethoca’s collaboration network, which aims to significantly reduce losses from Card Not Present (CNP) fraud and quickly resolve customer service disputes by sharing real-time data.
Lopez has held senior positions with FICO, TransUnion, and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) during his 19-year career and understands the hurdles faced by credit and debit card issuers when it comes to combatting fraud and transaction acceptance. At RBC he provided oversight of fraud risk for all RBC banking products and services. The initiatives and strategies he championed led to a significant reduction in card fraud losses.
During his seven years at FICO, he worked closely with more than 135 issuers and processors across 39 countries to implement optimal risk management solutions that drove improvements in fraud loss recovery, collection operations and customer satisfaction.
CNP Fraud and chargebacks are becoming an increasingly global challenge for card issuers and merchants as criminals continue to exploit the most vulnerable remote channels, including ecommerce and MOTO (Mail Order/Telephone Order). This is being influenced by many factors, including the growth in cross-border ecommerce and the adoption of EMV/chip card in the United States – an event that will increase CNP fraud in markets around the world. For the industry’s largest card issuing service providers and their banking customers, the result is increased losses, higher chargeback processing costs, more fraud and dispute claims, and poor customer satisfaction. By participating in the Ethoca Network, card issuing service providers can potentially recover these losses on behalf of possibly thousands of card issuing banks globally.
Every day, 29 banks and 500+ credit unions on Ethoca’s global network send confirmed fraud and customer dispute data to Ethoca. Ethoca then sends this data to 2,100+ merchants globally in the form of near real-time alerts that arrive within hours – not weeks later through the inefficient chargeback process. Because Ethoca Alerts provide an early warning on fraud and disputes that have already been confirmed by cardholders, Ethoca’s merchant customers around the world have the opportunity to stop fraud, halt the delivery of goods and services, and issue a refund to avoid the impending chargeback.
Through Ethoca’s growing card issuing service provider relationships and Fernando’s leadership, these merchants will get more – and faster – data from thousands of additional card issuers worldwide. Card issuers can benefit by recovering fraud losses – including 3D Secure and low-value transaction write-offs – faster and with a fraction of the cost and effort.
“Ethoca’s strength comes from scaling our collaboration network so more card issuers and merchants globally realize the proven and growing benefits,” said Trevor Clarke, Co-Founder and EVP, Issuer Relations, Ethoca. “Through Fernando’s deep relationships with card issuing service providers, Ethoca is getting access to even more timely confirmed fraud and dispute data that merchants are acting on immediately to stop fraud and chargebacks. The faster our expanding, global network of merchants takes action to stop fraud and chargebacks, the more value we deliver to card issuers worldwide – that’s the value exchange that keeps the network going.”