Raymond Huynh
Head of Risk
Finding his way home eventually led ShopBack’s Head of Risk to reinvent the fraud fighting experience
At ShopBack, Asia-Pacific’s leading shopping and rewards platform, there’s “no leeway for mediocrity.” With customer experience at the forefront and representing many of the region’s leading retail brands, the industry leader is “all-in on proactive improvements, useful product ideas and innovation and solutions that simplify.”
For Raymond Huynh, ShopBack’s Head of Risk, these aren’t just statements – they’re values that are exemplified in how he’s helped transform and safeguard the company for its best era yet.
Raymond’s journey to fighting fraud began in corporate banking as an underwriter, evaluating merchants based on risk profiles that examined both the nature and the level of threats a company may face. After eight years of approving or denying credit worthiness, he would join Klarna – a Swedish Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) bank – where he started as an analytics manager before working his way up to Head of Analytics and Finance.
At this point, however, Raymond’s career would take a personal turn. While still with Klarna, he longed for a change of pace, and moved closer to his home and family back in Australia.
“Being homesick and being far away from my family was the determining factor in deciding to go back home,” Raymond added. “The opportunity to work in Australia and be closer to them was simply too hard to pass up.”
Paving New Roads
But just as Raymond began pumping the brakes on his international career, he came to the realization that he wasn’t quite ready to settle down altogether. In fact, he found he was missing the fast-paced lifestyle and challenges that come in the world of risk.
Not long after returning home, ShopBack reached out to gauge Raymond’s interest in moving to Singapore to build their risk management organization – an opportunity to be a stakeholder in ShopBack’s digital transformation he described as “exciting.”
“When ShopBack reached out to me initially, the emotions were quite a roller coaster. At first, I was shocked and surprised, but that quickly followed with the curiosity to pursue the challenge,” Raymond said. “I was excited at the opportunity to start solving ShopBack’s problem statement of how to create value for both new and existing customers in their shopping journey.”
Originally, ShopBack’s business model was focused on online cashback, a program that rewards customers for shopping at partner retailers and “doesn’t garner much risk.” But as the company began to foray into the world of financial services – such as BNPL options and instant-purchase vouchers – they were facing an increase in fraudsters looking to exploit their new offerings.
In 2019, after officially launching their voucher product (prepaid cashback on items a customer knows they’ll purchase in the future), ShopBack was inundated with payment fraud. This rise in fraud – handled by an overwhelmed manual review team – made the rolling out of these new initiatives more of a challenge than originally anticipated, and threatened to damage relationships with both customers and retail partners.
“We were operating with a very lean internal risk product management stack,” Raymond said. “We had a handful of agents manually reviewing alerts, dashboards and observing trends, and then followed that by proactively banning cases individually.”
The challenges, however, also presented an opportunity for both Raymond and ShopBack’s Head of Product for Consumer Payments, Joey Yang, to begin the search for a vendor who could partner with ShopBack to reduce fraud – and also presented Raymond with the chance to put his stamp on enhancing the customer experience.
When evaluating vendors, there were several key things we indexed on – return on investment, user experience, and capability. Forter shined well above its competitors in all three aspects.
Succeeding as One
Dealing with the sudden increase in payment fraud, the ShopBack team found themselves in the market for not just a fraud prevention platform but a partner they could trust to help tackle all typologies of fraud.
Raymond is at the core of ShopBack’s digital commerce transformation. And following his unique career path, he credits his global experience in various industries as key to his development as a Decision Maker.
“In my career, I’ve been exposed to a number of different risk management strategies and keys to scaling risk organizations,” Raymond said. “A lot of my decision to join ShopBack was influenced by the opportunity to continue developing leadership skills while also helping to build a team that buys into the strategy and the vision that I'm articulating.”
Looking ahead, he says he only sees fraud continuing to evolve in sophistication and complexity – creating a sense of urgency when it comes to adding fraud protection to a company’s processes.
“Increased sophistication and a need to continually invest in tools and domain knowledge, in order to continually add to the risk management stack of your company, is vital,” Raymond said. “Fraud is an ever-evolving issue, and a lack of investment will be to the detriment of any player in digital commerce.”
And his advice to fellow decision makers? It all comes down to being intentional with your decisions and tackling issues head-on with your team.
Being a Decision Maker means being decisive and deliberate in your actions. When tackling problems, you must be wholehearted toward your decisions.
Within their organizations, decision makers are the audacious ones. Unconcerned with the status quo, they make moves designed to free themselves — and their teams — from the stress of fraud prevention.
With Forter, decision makers get guaranteed results so they can focus their time and energy on strategic opportunities that have a bigger impact on their organizations.
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Career Path
Joining ShopBack
Fraud Challenges
Partnering with Forter
Leadership & The Future of Fraud
This story is part of a Decision Makers series featuring industry leaders within our customer base.
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Outside of the three pillars Raymond described, he also highlighted the importance of finding a partner that could help solve fraud challenges, while maintaining ShopBack’s stellar customer experience.
“At the end of the day, when we build a product, we’re trying to maintain quality for our end users,” Raymond said. “So any solution we looked to instill into the ShopBack ecosystem had to be a solution that didn’t increase friction but ultimately reduced our risk – and Forter did just that.”
And since implementing Forter, Raymond's team has been able to reallocate time to focus on other important business priorities.
“We no longer have to allocate agents to manually analyze transactions on a day-to-day basis to tackle any kind of fraud,” Raymond said. “Freeing up resources on the tech side of things – namely our engineers – has also allowed us to scale and tackle other problem statements within our ecosystem.”
We no longer have to allocate agents to manually analyze transactions on a day-to-day basis to tackle any kind of fraud. Freeing up resources has also allowed us to scale and tackle other problem statements within our ecosystem.
CAREER PATH
JOINING SHOPBACK
FRAUD CHALLENGES
PARTNERING WITH FORTER
LEADERSHIP & THE FUTURE OF FRAUD
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