Fraud liability absorbed by a service provider isn't "zero fraud." It is: "you don't get charged directly for chargebacks and other financial penalties, but your brand is still at risk, plus you have no control over false positives."
True. But it's zero fraud from your perspective as a business.
You also have full control over false positives:
- First, we put txn's through several layers to ensure the highest rates of order approvals. If our algorithm is about to reject, it goes through a human review process to ensure we're approving as much as possible.
- If we reject, you have a force approve time window to approve transactions if you disagree with our decision. You have final decision-making. None of our merchants use this because they end up trusting us so much :-)
Our customers (some case studies here: https://bolt.com/case-studies) have switched from top-tier providers and seen substantial order approval lift.
Furthermore, we're also your payment processor. Typically fraud providers and payment processors are separate, so if fraud providers make a mistake, payment processors will slap the merchant on the wrist with what can ultimately be serious fines + more reserve requirements. We don't, because we're also your processor.
"Without proof of a lower rate, default processing is 2.9% + $0.30 for VISA/Mastercard/ Discover, 3.5% + $0.30 for AMEX, and $20 for any chargeback dispute not covered."
This looks like a really well positioned and differentiated entrance into the payment provider market.
Eliminating fraudulent chargebacks addresses a serious pain point for a large market segment. It’s an angle that allows it to answer the “why not just use Stripe” from day one — which is a really hard question to answer with a just launched service.
It looks / feels like stripe but without the brand recognition, I'd hope it's more cost effective than competitors but having to contact them for pricing doesn't inspire confidence. I also don't see how this is any more frictionless than competitors. On the flip side I'm a little blown away by how big the team is and how many jobs they have listed considering it's only launched a couple hours ago - whoever bank rolled this has a lot of faith. Congrats on the launch either way.
Good question. Definitely need to add to the site.
You can accept a credit card from anywhere in the world. We also support 50+ localized currencies.
However, we can only settle to a US/Canadian bank account. We can do an instant transfer to an intl bank account, but some companies don't want funds touching the US/Canada for tax reasons.
If you are ok with that on the settlement side, you're in good shape! Adding more settlement countries and local acquiring is a top priority for the next year.
CEO of Bolt here. We'll be writing more about this in the future. In short, our fraud detection is really really good (although not perfect). However, the fraud that ends up making it through the pipeline is so minimal that we cover it fully. So, for a small fee as an online business you never have to pay for / deal with fraudulent chargebacks again.
There are other companies that do this, but none of them also do payments. They're kinda like rebate programs where you submit your fraud to them and they pay it off like insurance. It's a lot of manual work, back-and-forth, and they end up not doing a great job. So, this is a first for the industry.
Why is our fraud detection so much more accurate? We have access to the full stack of data across checkout, payments, and the user's shopping experience, collecting 200+ variables on every transaction. Most silo'd fraud providers may end up getting 10-20 variables and have to make uniformed decisions, resulting in $10's billions in false positives (good customers getting rejected by fraud tools) in the US every year.
They're just underwriting the risk so they guarantee "zero fraud" to the merchant. And they just have traditional risk-assessment algorithms applied aggressively.
rbres, first off, thank you for sticking around and answering our occasionally snarky questions.
Second, what is meant by "Amazon-like checkout?" If that "YOUR BRAND" thing on the front page is a screenshot/representation of the service, it appears to be an AJAXy overlay over the normal site similar to what one of PayPal's three dozen or so integration methods does. I wouldn't qualify that as "Amazon-like" since it doesn't well integrate with the rest of the site in terms of look and feel.
Amazon is currently able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into perfecting the checkout experience. There are actually hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability
We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout. So that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.
Now that you say it, Amazon-like can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with checkout by optimizing their payments flows.
Judging from Crunchbase[0], it looks like this company did a pretty interesting pivot:
"Bolt is an online payments platform which allows users to make payments through digital currencies such as bitcoin.
Bolt wants to give e-commerce retailers a better shot at competing with Amazon."
Can anybody at Bolt talk about that transition? Why is there less focus on digital currencies? Any interesting success/failure stories of eccommerce companies using digital currencies?
Big fans of crypto. I co-started the Stanford Bitcoin Group back in the day. Dropped out of school to re-engineer online payments originally inspired by crypto.
We realized crypto's shortcomings in mainstream payments (after a valiant year long quest) when we also had an aha-moment about how to re-engineer traditional online payments. Thus, the Bolt you see today.
Consumer identity fraud isn't the only type of fraud problem that needs to be solved from the payment processor POV - there's also friendly fraud (when the customer is actually the owner of the credit card but claims fraud anyway), merchant fraud (merchants setting up bad sites and trying to steal funds), and collusion between merchant and customer.
It seems like Bolt is focused on solving the consumer identity fraud problem for merchants, but this biz models will 100% make them a huge target for fraudulent merchants to collude with customers to steal funds.
I guess I don't see how even an additional low single digit % fee will make up for false negatives. Assuming the company keeps .5% of the standard payment processing fee + takes an additional ~3% in fees on top of that, a $1000 false negative would require $1000/(.035) = ~$28.5k in additional processing volume to breakeven. This doesn't even take into the account the fact Bolt will eat the chargeback fee passed on from the network, so merchants with high volume/low average order value (think digital goods) will be hugely expensive for Bolt to service given they're making pennies per transaction but potentially paying 10x+ that per chargeback.
We vet our merchants before onboarding and make sure to work with high-integrity companies. We monitor orders not just for identity fraud, but for merchant / collusion fraud.
That being said, we can certainly make mistakes. We also end up in the red some months with some clients. The good thing is that when we make a mistake, we pay the cost, not the merchant (which is contrary to the current state of the industry).
We have made reasonable profit per client even with our costs, but the real winners are our clients driving millions in newfound revenue.
See the fine print too. They have tiered service. I don't know why they are advertising their super plan on the front page as if its their whole offering...
"If you have Bolt's fraud indemnification, Bolt will fully cover the costs of and manage fraud-related chargebacks. But, you will still be responsible for Merchant-related chargebacks (damaged goods, goods not received, unhappy customers, etc.)"
"If you do not have Bolt's fraud indemnification, we will contact you via Email to inform you of the chargeback. Your merchant account will be charged that full order amount plus a $20 processing fee. Then, we will request the appropriate information to help you fight the chargeback with the card network. If you win the dispute, you will receive the full order amount credited back."
That's effectively the same thing as zero fraud for anything that matters, if you never have to pay for it, no?
I mean, I guess if someone fraudulently signed up for a subscription, you'd lose the future expected monthly subscription fees or whatever.
But it's pretty much good enough. When I saw "zero fraud" advertised, my immediate assumption was that they paid for any fraud, and they were confident they had fraud low enough to do that and still be profitable. No other way to get truly "zero".
I have intermittent issues scrolling the fullstack job post (https://bolt.com/jobs/fullstack-engineer) in Chrome for iOS. Requesting the desktop site seemed to fix it. I was also able to get it working by randomly clicking the other postings and coming back. If I wasn't eating lunch I'd try to debug it better but it's easily possible this is only affecting my phone.
Am I reading the "acceptable user policy"[0] correctly in noting that any of the adult entertainment industries and those currently operating in the unknown at Patreon (Stripe), would likely not be welcome at Bolt either?
Our team did a pretty significant integration with Bolt last year.
Their platform is solid and was straight forward to integrate with. Their development team was also extremely helpful and helped us through the process at every step we needed them. They really did go above and beyond for us.
I'm so excited to see Bolt redefine the payment space! If they can successfully defeat fraud, make it easier for customers to pay, AND integrate other payment methods, etc. - then this will be a BIG win!
[+] [-] amcnett|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
You also have full control over false positives: - First, we put txn's through several layers to ensure the highest rates of order approvals. If our algorithm is about to reject, it goes through a human review process to ensure we're approving as much as possible. - If we reject, you have a force approve time window to approve transactions if you disagree with our decision. You have final decision-making. None of our merchants use this because they end up trusting us so much :-)
Our customers (some case studies here: https://bolt.com/case-studies) have switched from top-tier providers and seen substantial order approval lift.
Furthermore, we're also your payment processor. Typically fraud providers and payment processors are separate, so if fraud providers make a mistake, payment processors will slap the merchant on the wrist with what can ultimately be serious fines + more reserve requirements. We don't, because we're also your processor.
[+] [-] jpobst|8 years ago|reply
Followed up with "Get a Quote" rather than displaying simple pricing...
[+] [-] grenoire|8 years ago|reply
"Without proof of a lower rate, default processing is 2.9% + $0.30 for VISA/Mastercard/ Discover, 3.5% + $0.30 for AMEX, and $20 for any chargeback dispute not covered."
[+] [-] LeonM|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thruflo22|8 years ago|reply
Eliminating fraudulent chargebacks addresses a serious pain point for a large market segment. It’s an angle that allows it to answer the “why not just use Stripe” from day one — which is a really hard question to answer with a just launched service.
Congratulations.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brod|8 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/TBTF63h.png https://i.imgur.com/HP0DNNg.png
It looks / feels like stripe but without the brand recognition, I'd hope it's more cost effective than competitors but having to contact them for pricing doesn't inspire confidence. I also don't see how this is any more frictionless than competitors. On the flip side I'm a little blown away by how big the team is and how many jobs they have listed considering it's only launched a couple hours ago - whoever bank rolled this has a lot of faith. Congrats on the launch either way.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
Main differences:
- Stripe = APIs to build your own payment stack.
- Bolt = fully out of the box payments stack. Checkout that doesn't only do payments but also shipping/tax/user-auth. Also w/ 100% fraud coverage.
Also to set the record a bit more clearly: we launched in stealth 1.5 years ago, have been moving $100Ms, and have dozens of case studies.
Appreciate the kind words too!
[+] [-] lobo_tuerto|8 years ago|reply
Didn't see a FAQ on the homepage, nor found the answer on a quick search, so I'm asking here.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
You can accept a credit card from anywhere in the world. We also support 50+ localized currencies.
However, we can only settle to a US/Canadian bank account. We can do an instant transfer to an intl bank account, but some companies don't want funds touching the US/Canada for tax reasons.
If you are ok with that on the settlement side, you're in good shape! Adding more settlement countries and local acquiring is a top priority for the next year.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
There are other companies that do this, but none of them also do payments. They're kinda like rebate programs where you submit your fraud to them and they pay it off like insurance. It's a lot of manual work, back-and-forth, and they end up not doing a great job. So, this is a first for the industry.
Why is our fraud detection so much more accurate? We have access to the full stack of data across checkout, payments, and the user's shopping experience, collecting 200+ variables on every transaction. Most silo'd fraud providers may end up getting 10-20 variables and have to make uniformed decisions, resulting in $10's billions in false positives (good customers getting rejected by fraud tools) in the US every year.
[+] [-] bri3d|8 years ago|reply
Here are a few articles with more : https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/23/bolt-launches-an-amazon-li...
There's really nothing of a sea change here, just optimization of existing techniques.
[+] [-] Cyberdog|8 years ago|reply
Second, what is meant by "Amazon-like checkout?" If that "YOUR BRAND" thing on the front page is a screenshot/representation of the service, it appears to be an AJAXy overlay over the normal site similar to what one of PayPal's three dozen or so integration methods does. I wouldn't qualify that as "Amazon-like" since it doesn't well integrate with the rest of the site in terms of look and feel.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
Amazon is currently able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into perfecting the checkout experience. There are actually hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability
We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout. So that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.
Now that you say it, Amazon-like can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with checkout by optimizing their payments flows.
[+] [-] emarthinsen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
Is pretty consistent with our style today.
[+] [-] slap_shot|8 years ago|reply
"Bolt is an online payments platform which allows users to make payments through digital currencies such as bitcoin.
Bolt wants to give e-commerce retailers a better shot at competing with Amazon."
Can anybody at Bolt talk about that transition? Why is there less focus on digital currencies? Any interesting success/failure stories of eccommerce companies using digital currencies?
Always happy to hear about successful pivots.
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
We realized crypto's shortcomings in mainstream payments (after a valiant year long quest) when we also had an aha-moment about how to re-engineer traditional online payments. Thus, the Bolt you see today.
News on crypto for online payments to come :-)
[+] [-] dawhizkid|8 years ago|reply
It seems like Bolt is focused on solving the consumer identity fraud problem for merchants, but this biz models will 100% make them a huge target for fraudulent merchants to collude with customers to steal funds.
I guess I don't see how even an additional low single digit % fee will make up for false negatives. Assuming the company keeps .5% of the standard payment processing fee + takes an additional ~3% in fees on top of that, a $1000 false negative would require $1000/(.035) = ~$28.5k in additional processing volume to breakeven. This doesn't even take into the account the fact Bolt will eat the chargeback fee passed on from the network, so merchants with high volume/low average order value (think digital goods) will be hugely expensive for Bolt to service given they're making pennies per transaction but potentially paying 10x+ that per chargeback.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
Some comments on that in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216682
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216936
We vet our merchants before onboarding and make sure to work with high-integrity companies. We monitor orders not just for identity fraud, but for merchant / collusion fraud.
That being said, we can certainly make mistakes. We also end up in the red some months with some clients. The good thing is that when we make a mistake, we pay the cost, not the merchant (which is contrary to the current state of the industry).
We have made reasonable profit per client even with our costs, but the real winners are our clients driving millions in newfound revenue.
[+] [-] AdieuToLogic|8 years ago|reply
Note that both do not require merchant knowledge or collusion.
[+] [-] IshKebab|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goldenkey|8 years ago|reply
"If you have Bolt's fraud indemnification, Bolt will fully cover the costs of and manage fraud-related chargebacks. But, you will still be responsible for Merchant-related chargebacks (damaged goods, goods not received, unhappy customers, etc.)"
"If you do not have Bolt's fraud indemnification, we will contact you via Email to inform you of the chargeback. Your merchant account will be charged that full order amount plus a $20 processing fee. Then, we will request the appropriate information to help you fight the chargeback with the card network. If you win the dispute, you will receive the full order amount credited back."
https://docs.bolt.com/docs/risk-fraud-and-order-review
[+] [-] jrochkind1|8 years ago|reply
I mean, I guess if someone fraudulently signed up for a subscription, you'd lose the future expected monthly subscription fees or whatever.
But it's pretty much good enough. When I saw "zero fraud" advertised, my immediate assumption was that they paid for any fraud, and they were confident they had fraud low enough to do that and still be profitable. No other way to get truly "zero".
[+] [-] w0rd-driven|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://bolt.com/acceptable-use
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
Hoping to expand to more business categories as we grow.
[+] [-] mcntsh|8 years ago|reply
Their platform is solid and was straight forward to integrate with. Their development team was also extremely helpful and helped us through the process at every step we needed them. They really did go above and beyond for us.
[+] [-] Redoubts|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
We hope to shorten the list as time goes on.
[+] [-] mholt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
We've had it for close to 3 years though.
[+] [-] RageOn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesalminen|8 years ago|reply
https://cardconnect.com/bolt
[+] [-] jccooper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply