Kingfisher rolls out anti-fraud system

Retail group Kingfisher is extending the rollout of fraud prevention payment processing software across its online stores after successfully deploying it at three sites.

Kingfisher, which owns Superdrug, B&Q, Comet and MVC among others, is planning to install ClearCommerce's Merchant Engine payment software across all its consumer sites. The decision follows successful implementations at B&Q, Woolworth's and Superdrug.

Paul Worthington, chief technology officer of the company's ebusiness arm, e-Kingfisher, said it originally brought in the secure payment software as part of a complete overhaul of the Woolworth's ebusiness site.

He denied that the installation had anything to do with the site being shut down in August following a security glitch which exposed customer credit card details.

"The bottom line is that we decided to implement a standard platform over B&Q, Woolworth's and Superdrug, and we evaluated a number of elements of the overall infrastructure. One was the payment gateway," he said.

Worthington confirmed that the Superdrug deployment suffered from some problems. When the website introduced higher value goods such as designer perfumes, the number of fraudulent transactions increased.

The problem was traced to the fact that the rules determining which transactions to accept did not take the value of goods into account. When the rules were changed, fraud levels dropped. "We are always changing the rules to improve the performance. It is a process more than a problem," he said.

Fraudulent transactions are an issue for online stores because, unlike high street shops, they are liable for the cost of any goods bought with stolen or fake credit cards because the card is not present during the purchase.

The ClearCommerce software checks for fraudulently generated card numbers and allows Kingfisher to set the level of authorisation for each transaction before the secure socket layer connection to the bank is opened.

"Once the line to the bank is open, the retailer can score the probability of it being a fraudulent transaction," said Alan Scutt, European managing director at ClearCommerce.

First published in Computing