# Unlocking Payments Automation

# Without Increasing Fraud

## CUSTOMER

## PROFILE

Astra is transforming the consumer 
financial services experience 
with a platform that combines 
universal banking, personal finance 
management and automated 
bank transfers.

## The Business Challenge

Astra enables consumers to link bank accounts across financial institutions into 
a single interface for a clear “mapping” of their financial lives.  With this unified 
view, Astra provides programmatic saving and cash flow management routines, 
enabling consumers to automate transfers according to triggers and rules.

On the backend, this integrated customer experience is powered by a library 
of APIs built for ease and simplicity. But on the front end, Astra found itself 
introducing customer friction. After launching their product, Astra found early 
indications that fraudsters were attempting to misuse the platform. To mitigate 
the associated risk, Astra introduced a default limit of $100 on all money 
movement transactions, even though that limited the utility of the automated 
routines.

To address the situation properly, Astra had to answer a question plaguing 
the overall fintech market — **How do we raise limits to improve usability** 
**without opening the door for more fraud?**

---

## “

We wanted to use Socure to add 
nuance to the way we viewed 
customers so we could onboard 
good customers more quickly and 
respond more precisely to others.

**Gil Akos, Co-Founder**

## The Socure Experience

The Astra team was referred to Socure by multiple fraud colleagues. Astra 
implemented Socure ID+ fraud monitoring solutions with the goal of preventing 
the riskiest population from enrolling, while easing the experience—and raising 
transaction limits—for good customers.

Since Socure integration, 
Astra’s user base has grown
**200%**

Powered by advanced machine learning models leveraged across a wide set 
of internal and external data sources, Socure ID+ correlative email and phone 
models consider hundreds of data sources to gain a holistic view for identity 
verification and to predict the likelihood of fraud. These models produce realtime, actionable risk scores, allowing Astra to automate customer enrollment 
and review decisions. For Astra, automation is a key element – the company’s 
product strategy is designed providing rich features for users without them to 
take manual action.

Socure ID+ phone and email risk models provide Astra with a multidimensional 
view of identity risk and introduce the concept of trust for day zero identities.

“We wanted to use Socure to add nuance to the way we viewed customers so 
we could onboard good customers more quickly and respond more precisely to 
others,” said Gil Akos, Astra co-founder.

Auto-acceptance rates
**97.90%**

Fraud risk scores are also used in combination with Astra’s Know Your 
Customer (KYC) process, introducing nuance to a typically binary regulatory 
compliance process.

## The Results: Higher Limits; Increased Volume and Enrollment

Gaining a handle on fraud risk and identity verification, Astra raised default 
limits by a factor of 10 to $1,000 from $100.

With raised limits, Astra has seen its user base consistently grow more than 
20% month over month, and money transfer volumes are increasing faster 
than new users are added. To date,  Astra has processed $1.5m in transfers, 
manages $150m in cumulative balances across 20,000 accounts, and expects 
continued rates of high growth all while maintaining a high degree of security 
with Socure.

## ABOUT SOCURE

Socure is the leader in creating high-assurance digital identity verification 
technology. Its predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and 
machine-learning techniques with trusted online/offline data intelligence from 
email, phone, address, IP, social media and the broader Internet to verify 
identities in real-time.