Fintech giant Revolut plans to extend its proven security wrapper, Revolut Pay, to crypto customers from early 2025 to improve protection against fraudulent attacks.

As it stands, Revolut says, visibility into the card transactions and bank transfers its crypto customers make with the exchanges is limited, potentially exposing them to higher levels of fraud due to the mechanisms of card with limited anti-scam protections.

A 12-month pilot with businesses using Revolut Pay’s enhanced due diligence, direct API integration and end-to-end control of the payment process showed that crypto customers were exposed to around 50 % fewer fraud attempts, Revolut said in a statement.

These improvements include know-your-customer (KYC) name matching, fraud warning screens, crypto proof of delivery, and the ability for crypto traders to receive transaction risk scores.

Crypto has more than its fair share of fraudulent activity and scams, whether it be identity theft, phishing scams, and even the involvement of Deep AI Fakes and so on.

“In the crypto space, there is a bit of an issue with fraud outcomes,” Alex Codina, general manager of merchant payments at Revolut, said in an interview. “Now crypto companies, whether exchanges or onramps, can integrate Revolut Pay as a payment method and in doing so we enable our users to directly purchase cryptocurrencies on these checkouts more safely.”

Match your customer

Under the hood, integration with third-party exchanges or on-ramps begins with KYC matching, thus validating that the person buying on the Revolut side is the same person who is KYC on the exchange side.

“If these names do not match, the transaction is rejected. In the card world, that would be the equivalent of a stolen card or something like that,” Codina said.

Beyond that, companies are waging an ongoing battle to combat a sophisticated array of investment scams, in which customers are tricked into believing they must make one trade or another to qualify for a fictitious reward, whatever it may be, he added.

“These are the hardest problems to deal with,” Codina said. “Basically, we assess the risk score of the transaction based on information about our users, for example whether or not they have traded cryptocurrencies in the past with Revolut, with a third party, and assess the likelihood that this transaction is part of an investment scam.

Clearly, a balance needs to be struck between user experience and security, Codina said. The security measures Revolut puts in place may consist of one or two questions about the transaction, or in some cases the customer may be referred to a customer service representative to briefly discuss the transaction.

“We have a pretty robust model and framework where we can add some friction, depending on how risky we think the transaction is,” he said.