Redefining Merchant Portfolio Risk Management

ZeroRisk: Our mission is to redefine merchant portfolio risk management

The past year has been a challenging one for many of us. But it has also created the unique conditions which lead us today to an exciting tipping point. As more businesses expand online, and customer money and payment data flow in the same direction, it’s never been more important for Merchant Service Providers (MSPs) to understand how their risk profile is evolving.

Into this world steps ZeroRisk, enabling a new way of doing things. We’re backed by decades of payments and cyber security expertise, utilizing proven technology but designed for a new era of payment security compliance and third-party risk management.

The story so far

PCI DSS is at its heart all about risk identification and mitigation. By understanding where merchants are most exposed, acquirers can support merchants and Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in making specific improvements to protect end customers from fraud, and the payment chain from lost reputation and earnings. Yet over recent years, compliance efforts have drifted— today too many merchants treat it merely as a tick-box exercise.

This isn’t necessarily the market’s fault. To date, there simply weren’t any solutions out there to help MSPs understand with any accuracy the real security posture of their clients. Engagement from merchants is low as in-house cyber expertise is often limited and they see this as another form to fill, with little or no value for their own business. This becomes an expensive and complex problem for MSPs to manage when multiplied by the tens of thousands of merchants across their portfolio.

This is the problem we fell in love with, and ZeroRisk is our solution. Our mission: to provide an end-to-end merchant portfolio risk management system to help MSPs manage effective compliance programs at scale. At the same time, we want to drive real value for merchants by helping them to understand what their real security posture is, and then guiding them through any required remediation.

Why now?

Sentiment studies showed us that the market wasn’t satisfied with current solutions for managing PCI compliance. Merchants weren’t engaged and acquirers were seeing limited ROI, as compliance rates continued to decline. Against this backdrop, we feel that now is the time to reshape third-party programs around risk, rather than tick-box compliance.

It’s also been the result of five years of planning and in-house technology development. The culmination of our efforts to bring in some of the most talented and experienced executives in the payments and cyber security sectors.

What is the proposition?

ZeroRisk is built on something unique: a security risk scoring system which allows MSPs to independently validate the cyber security and compliance posture of their merchants at scale, without any intervention required from the merchants themselves. This is our breakthrough IP and it allows us to automate contextualized risk assessments at scale for our MSP customers. This enables them to gain real-time insight into their merchants and to follow-up, not only with advice on remedial actions but with better payment and technology solutions.

It’s a far cry from the static, point-in-time and incomplete information MSPs are used to working with. The actionable insights ZeroRisk generates create value and new business opportunities right across the whole payments ecosystem — driving cost efficiencies, enhancing compliance and risk reduction efforts while transforming cost centers into revenue centers.