Our Overall Rating:

Web Shield

Sign up with Web Shield

You will be redirected to Web Shield

Tuesday, September 29th, 2020
Best Payment Providers

A Good Fit For:


What We Like

Web Shield provides the payment industry with safeguards for businesses, protecting them from suspicious merchants engaged in illegal operations. Their highly accurate “digital investigation tools” like InvestiGate and Monitor give acquirers, payment service providers, and other financial establishments the data they need to make judicious decisions about potential clients and warn them when current clients act shadily.

What We Didn't Like

No issues were found at this time.


Need a hand?

Finding the right provider can be a tricky task. You'll need to find the payment partner that is most suited to your business, with the lowest rates, and best customer service. We are payment experts, and can help you find the right solution. We provide consultation for free, and will never charge you for advice.



Marketing

Sales

Support

Pricing

Overall

Overview

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in London, England, Web Shield is known as a leader in on-boarding, underwriting, and provider for monitoring solutions.

The current payment infrastructure is permeated with assaults from fraudulent activities. The biggest defenders from this ongoing risk are the payment service providers and the acquiring banks. They ultimately hold the power, (via their risk, compliance, and underwriting departments) to determine which merchants get their card accepted. However, if they ever become careless and neglect this critical function, they leave themselves defenseless against hefty fees from regulators and credit card associations.

To resolve this, Web Shield has perfected the monitoring of merchants and on-boarding processes as effective as necessary.

The InvestiGate On-Boarding Solution binds together multiple “investigative modules” in one platform for maximum convenience, facilitating teams to work faster and more effectively. From the moment a merchant’s information is entered, its research engine ticks all the vital red flags. Advanced “mirroring techniques” guarantee that results will be available in less than seven minutes.

InvestiGate’s core modules go above and beyond “keyword flagging”. They offer the following:

– Portfolio Cross-Check: uncovers previously unknown relationships between entities.
– Virtual Address Detection: shows if a merchant has a physical presence at the indicated address.
– Underwriting Checklist: offers tips for performing underwriting efficiently.
– Business Classification: allows integration of business-related guidance into your underwriting.
– Website Auto-Compliance: rates the merchant’s website for compliance with current best practices.
– Audit Trail: automatically documents the process of underwriting.
– SiteAlert: alerts you about any hit on their crowdsourced warning list.
– License Verification: compares the merchant’s name against associated whitelists.

InvestiGate also offers optional modules. This allows underwriters to accommodate investigations based on their company’s requirements:

– Transaction Laundering Detection: reveals merchant websites possibly used for transaction laundering.
– Historical Website Data: allows you to review historical data.
– Document Service: independently validates corporate documents and ownership information.
– Credit Risk Exposure Manager: computes the default risk and recommends collaterals.
– Merchant Location Determination: finds the merchant’s principal place of business and verifies if it matches your licensing area.
– Web Shield Case Service: gets false positives cleared or a completely serviced case file.
– Member Area Crawling: monitors restricted member areas for content infractions.

Third-parties have also been made available within InvestiGate. It boasts a growing number of credit bureaus, sanction list providers, and identity verification services. As soon as the merchant is on-boarded, PULSE, a modular monitoring solution, kicks in and provides different options:

– Content Violations: Locate content violations based on credit card association rules.
– Website Compliance: Keep abreast of modifications on an entity’s website such as the name, address or website status.
– MCC Detect: Automatically determine a website’s Merchant Category Code.
– Reputation Scan: Investigate the latest customer complaints, criminal charges, fraud warnings and negative news.
– Transaction Laundering: Determine unknown websites in need of registration or prone to transaction laundering.
– Deceptive Traffic Detection: Monitor website traffic for deceitful marketing practices.

The unique point of difference for Web Shield is that their solutions are unsurpassed in both their speed and precision. In addition, their modular design of their top-of-the-line SaaS solutions can be configured to the company’s particular “risk appetite” and compliance guidelines.

Within their monitoring practices, their features include portfolio cross-check, virtual address detection, website auto compliance, and site alert.

For their KYC Compliance, they offer money laundering detection, Compliance sanctions & PEP screening, Deceptive traffic detection, and Predictive risk analysis.

Some of their clients include: Wirecard, Paysafe, Payvision, Concardis (for onboarding and monitoring).

As far as other services, they offer additional training for underwriters and cryptocurrency compliance resources for merchants and acquirers.

They specifically encourage the growth of the community of risk professionals via their training programs in Web Shield Academy and the RiskConnect Conference.

Web Shield is very much involved in the payment industry ecosystem and stays on top of current developments in the regulation technology field. Some of its associations include Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, Electronic Transactions Association, European Financial Coalition, International RegTech Association, Vendorcom, Internet Watch Foundation, and European Payments Service Providers for Merchants.

Christian Chmiel, CEO of Web Shield, authored the book, “Fundamentals of Card-not-Present Merchant Acceptance”, as a “best practice guide for underwriters’. The book delves into risk indicators that underwriters must keep in mind and include within their investigation. It offers valuable online resources, analytical tools, and covers topics such as “illegal aggregation.”

On September 17th, 2018, 4Stop, a global provider of KYC, fraud prevention, and compliance announced its partnership with Web Shield to launch its “global merchant underwriting solution.” Their mission was to combine forces and help businesses control their risk model and onboard their merchants with confidence.

Marketing

Web Shield offers its services through its website at webshield.com. It also publishes risk management guides annually. Their Web Shield Academy provides risk professionals comprehensive fraud detection courses. By hosting networking conferences such as RiskConnect, they have established themselves as authorities in the field of due diligence as well as fraud prevention.

Honesty

Although there is not a lot of information about the company’s pricing, there are virtually no complaints to be found about hidden fees or misleading tactics. This can be considered positive. 

Sales

Web Shield has sought out significant partners to offer more merchants the opportunity to mitigate risk. 

On September 17th, 2018, 4Stop, a global provider of KYC, fraud prevention, and compliance announced its partnership with Web Shield to launch its “global merchant underwriting solution.” Their mission was to combine forces and help businesses control their risk model and onboard their merchants with confidence. 

With this partnership, Web Shield offers its InvestiGate solution that contains highly accurate digital investigative modules, comprehensive risk analysis, with real-time results. While 4Stop uses its KYC suite to carry out due diligence on “business directors” and enhance the data experience. 

Lastly, businesses get constant underwriting services as well as “real-time merchant monitoring”. All this equips businesses with everything they need to make sure their risk, compliance and fraud prevention techniques are controlled.

Support

Web Shield is available for contact by email and by phone.  On their website, they also provide a contact form to request more information or to request a free trial or demo of their product.  The current contact form on their website seems to be directed to their German headquarters in Leipzig.

Pricing

For Web Shield’s pricing model, they offer subscription and on-demand. Again, the specific pricing of these models or any further details are not clearly displayed on their website.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *