Call it karmic balance: companies struggling to identify anonymous customers must also strain to verify that people who do identify themselves are really who they claim. The reason, of course, is there are more fraud possibilities as online business expands. One example of the growing identity authentication industry: Mastercard just bought anti-fraud identity specialist Ekata for a cool $850 million.
Privacy browser Brave has removed FLoC from its version for desktop and Android, and search engine DuckDuckGo has changed its browser extension to block Google’s FLoC tracking in Chrome. FLoC, which is Google’s “Federated Learning of Cohorts,” claims to be privacy-friendly, but “shares information about browsing behavior with sites and advertisers,” according to Brave executives.
On the same lines, digital commerce protection platform Signifyd just raised a $205 million Series E. Signifyd doubled its revenue last year and expects to reach a $200 million run rate by 2022. The company has an identity graph that can be used to improve customer experience as well as reduce fraud.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.