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Bolt: An End-To-End Payments Stack with Zero Fraud
- StavrosK 9y agoDoes anyone know how this guarantees exactly zero fraud? The page just tells you to book a demo.
- bri3d 9y agoThey're just underwriting the risk so they guarantee "zero fraud" to the merchant. And they just have traditional risk-assessment algorithms applied aggressively. Here are a few articles with more : https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/23/bolt-launches-an-amazon-like-checkout-experience-for-the-rest-of-online-retail/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/23/bolt-launches-an-amazon-li... There's really nothing of a sea change here, just optimization of existing techniques.
- jessaustin 9y agoFrom your much more informative link: It does things like track where the mouse is moving on the page, whether someone is copying and pasting information into the fields, whether they’re making typos, how fast they’re typing, and many other factors. By analyzing customer behavioral patterns, Bolt says it has a better shot at stopping fraud than just asking for the billing address. I wonder how this handles autocomplete? In a sense it would be a good sign if the browser already knows given and family names etc., but could that be differentiated from a quick (perhaps extension-assisted) cut'n'paste?
- rbres 9y agoCEO of Bolt here. We'll be writing more about this in the future. In short, our fraud detection is really really good (although not perfect). However, the fraud that ends up making it through the pipeline is so minimal that we cover it fully. So, for a small fee as an online business you never have to pay for / deal with fraudulent chargebacks again. There are other companies that do this, but none of them also do payments. They're kinda like rebate programs where you submit your fraud to them and they pay it off like insurance. It's a lot of manual work, back-and-forth, and they end up not doing a great job. So, this is a first for the industry. Why is our fraud detection so much more accurate? We have access to the full stack of data across checkout, payments, and the user's shopping experience, collecting 200+ variables on every transaction. Most silo'd fraud providers may end up getting 10-20 variables and have to make uniformed decisions, resulting in $10's billions in false positives (good customers getting rejected by fraud tools) in the US every year.
- lykr0n 9y agoSo, you're providing fraud protection to merchants the same way Amex/Discover/Master Card/Visa does to consumers?
- rbres 9y agoThat's correct. Today, merchants are on the line for any fraud that they incur. When you call your bank to report fraudulent activity, the merchant is out the goods + has to pay fees/fines + has to return the money + deals with paperwork overhead. Bolt completely eliminates all of that. We're taking a stand to end fraud and take on all the liability for our clients.
- steve19 9y agoIf I buy a product from a website using Bolt, and for whatever legitimate reason I do a chargeback, let's say the product never arrived and the company refused to acknowledge this, will the anti fraud ban me from buying from any of your clients ever again? I once had a tracked package marked as delivered, despite the entire neighborhood being cordoned off by police with nobody but residents being allowed in. Despite proof of this, the merchant refused to accept the package was not and could never have been delivered.
- rbres 9y agoNope, you'll only be black-marked if you actually committed fraud. Any time there is a customer dispute, we're able to act as a middle ground often times. If a merchant is a bad-actor, we'll give them some time to fix their customer service. Or, we'd have to part ways with them.
- steve19 9y agoThanks for the reply.
- juskrey 9y agoIs it always the case that more variables are necessary better? After some sweet spot, with more variables false correlations increase exponentially.
- jpobst 9y ago"No more games. Save real money with Bolt's simple pricing." Followed up with "Get a Quote" rather than displaying simple pricing...
- grenoire 9y agoOn the pricing page: "Without proof of a lower rate, default processing is 2.9% + $0.30 for VISA/Mastercard/ Discover, 3.5% + $0.30 for AMEX, and $20 for any chargeback dispute not covered."
- ABCLAW 9y agoHoly shit, those are titanic interchange fees.
- rbres 9y agoThat's the starting processing rate for any major processor: - https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-pricing https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintree-pricing - https://stripe.com/us/pricing https://stripe.com/us/pricing All of our clients (typically larger businesses) provide proof of lower rates with their existing processors and get those rates 100% matched. We do not negotiate processing, we just match the industry.
- ABCLAW 9y agoNo, it isn't? Those are the prices for two providers that aren't even close to lowest-cost providers in the space. They compete on service, not price. I can get .9 to 2.0% (depending on the industry of my business) off the shelf from at least 6+ sources. And that's before any interchange rebate programs, volume discounts, or specially negotiated interchange waivers past a certain fee per quarter.
- rbres 9y agoAnd if you provide us a quote for that rate, we'll 100% match it. We can go as low as anyone else, and are trying to avoid the insanity of negotiating processing rates.
- kodablah 9y agoWhy do companies choose not to be 100% transparent? Any time I have to contact a company to see more or a demo or, even worse, see pricing, I close the page and make a mental note to never work with them in any capacity. I feel this type of boycotting is the only way to change the practice. I mean, you even hide your docs behind a password? How terrible. What are you keeping so secret? Does this translate to your other business practices? Mental note made.
- rbres 9y agoJust launched a couple hours ago. Thanks for the find, and I agree fully with the sentiment. Docs are now fully public: https://docs.bolt.com/ https://docs.bolt.com/ Pricing varies depending on volume, risk, and a number of different factors given the complexity of payments (and that we're taking on full liability). But after a short call we provide a very simple flat rate with no BS. As much as we'd like to do one price, given the nature of our product, it's just not viable at this time.
- jessaustin 9y agoThanks for that. The docs are considerably more reassuring than the rest of the site.
- rbres 9y agoAppreciate it. More to be published on the site, and welcome any and all feedback.
- sprite 9y agoIf you can't provide specific pricing maybe give a few sample pricings with different scenarios so people can at least ballpark it before requesting a quote?
- rbres 9y agoSure. Our fee ranges anywhere from a fraction of a percent to a couple percentage points. Companies selling $100k diamond jewelry (of which we have several) vs companies selling $100 bikes have different levels of risk. Most importantly, we typically charge 1/10 the revenue we generate for our clients: https://bolt.com/case-studies https://bolt.com/case-studies. Everyone who's signed up is 10X ROI positive. For a small single digit percent they're making double digit percent more money. On top of the Bolt Fee, we match processing, and that's about it.
- IshKebab 9y agoSo it's not really zero fraud, Bolt just covers the cost of fraud.
- goldenkey 9y agoSee the fine print too. They have tiered service. I don't know why they are advertising their super plan on the front page as if its their whole offering... "If you have Bolt's fraud indemnification, Bolt will fully cover the costs of and manage fraud-related chargebacks. But, you will still be responsible for Merchant-related chargebacks (damaged goods, goods not received, unhappy customers, etc.)" "If you do not have Bolt's fraud indemnification, we will contact you via Email to inform you of the chargeback. Your merchant account will be charged that full order amount plus a $20 processing fee. Then, we will request the appropriate information to help you fight the chargeback with the card network. If you win the dispute, you will receive the full order amount credited back." https://docs.bolt.com/docs/risk-fraud-and-order-review https://docs.bolt.com/docs/risk-fraud-and-order-review
- rbres 9y agoWe recently rolled all clients to the full offering. A couple legacy clients don't have the 100% fraud coverage, thus keeping it in the terms. But if you sign up with Bolt from this point forward, it bakes in the 100% fraud indemnification. Will probably even take that out of the terms soon.
- tyfon 9y agoSo what percent of the transaction number is flagged as fraud, and how many is actual fraud? Losing a customer that is not fraudulent due to aggressive filtering is almost as bad as having a fraudulent one.
- rbres 9y agoGood question. Addressed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216455 Our top focus is order approval lift. Zero fraud is cool and all (and makes for a good posting title) but is really just an assurance that you should be comfortable as we start to approve way more orders.
- thruflo22 9y agoThis looks like a really well positioned and differentiated entrance into the payment provider market. Eliminating fraudulent chargebacks addresses a serious pain point for a large market segment. It’s an angle that allows it to answer the “why not just use Stripe” from day one — which is a really hard question to answer with a just launched service. Congratulations.
- rbres 9y agoKind words are always appreciated :-)
- mholt 9y agoWas your domain recovered from a phishing site? It's blocked at my university.
- rbres 9y agoBolt.com has a huge history, including video-sharing that may have gotten it on those types of lists several years back. We've had it for close to 3 years though.
- mholt 9y agoThanks. I'm willing to bet my school's IT dept hasn't updated any of their network software in like 5 years, so that's not surprising. It's specifically tagged as phishing. Side-note: The link on HN goes to plain HTTP, hopefully you have HTTPS all set up!
- rbres 9y agoMakes sense. And yea thanks, the site auto-redirects to HTTPS.
- dsl 9y agoIf your domain has a mixed past, I'd strongly recommend registering a new clean domain (boltapi.net or similar) and loading all your checkout critical components from that.
- rbres 9y agoAh interesting suggestion, will consider it, thanks dsl.
- lobo_tuerto 9y agoWhat countries are you supporting currently? Is Mexico in that list? Didn't see a FAQ on the homepage, nor found the answer on a quick search, so I'm asking here.
- rbres 9y agoGood question. Definitely need to add to the site. You can accept a credit card from anywhere in the world. We also support 50+ localized currencies. However, we can only settle to a US/Canadian bank account. We can do an instant transfer to an intl bank account, but some companies don't want funds touching the US/Canada for tax reasons. If you are ok with that on the settlement side, you're in good shape! Adding more settlement countries and local acquiring is a top priority for the next year.
- qwerty456127 9y agoI'm interested too (EMEA).
- Cyberdog 9y agorbres, first off, thank you for sticking around and answering our occasionally snarky questions. Second, what is meant by "Amazon-like checkout?" If that "YOUR BRAND" thing on the front page is a screenshot/representation of the service, it appears to be an AJAXy overlay over the normal site similar to what one of PayPal's three dozen or so integration methods does. I wouldn't qualify that as "Amazon-like" since it doesn't well integrate with the rest of the site in terms of look and feel.
- rbres 9y agoAbsolutely, more than happy to :-) Amazon is currently able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into perfecting the checkout experience. There are actually hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability https://baymard.com/checkout-usability We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout. So that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy. Now that you say it, Amazon-like can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with checkout by optimizing their payments flows.
- ovao 9y agoIs it correct, though, that the checkout experience for users is a modal/overlay? And apart from the ability to display a custom logo, how customizeable is the design? (custom fonts, CSS, etc.)
- rbres 9y agoWe'll be rolling out more customization features. Big priority. They are sparse for now.
- mamcx 9y agoAvailable outside US? Where?
- rbres 9y agoYou can accept credit cards anywhere in the world, in 50+ different currencies. However, for now, settlement only to a US or Canadian bank account. We can do an instant transfer from a US/Canadian bank to an intlt account, but if you want to avoid US taxes and settle directly to an international bank, we do not support that. Our team is hard at work to support it in the next year.
- jrochkind1 9y agoSo my question would be how many legitimate customers do they reject as fraud (false positives) in order to eliminate false negatives? :)
- rbres 9y agoIt's pretty insane. Empirically, you'd rather let several fraudsters through in order to not trap a good customer (because of their customer lifetime value, brand value, etc). However, the industry does the opposite. They'll reject 3 good customers to catch 1 fraudster. It's really bad. Every switch to Bolt has seen a 1%-20% lift in order approval rates (while guaranteeing zero fraud) because of our unique data engine and data visibility. Huge reason why companies are switching to Bolt.
- jrochkind1 9y agoSo you're saying despite having better fraud detection, your false positive rates (orders that would have been non-fraudulent but rejected anyway) are _also_ lower than the competition? This is definitely something you might want to put in your marketting, but also back up in some way. As a general rule, I'm going to assume any reduction in false negatives has some increase in false positives. If the general rule is not true in your case, I'm going to need to be convinced. :)
- rbres 9y agoHere are some case studies to prove it: https://bolt.com/case-studies https://bolt.com/case-studies Many of our clients switched from top-tier fraud detection providers and saw significant lift in order approvals with Bolt. More case studies on the way.
- brod 9y agoSince there's no demo's I had a look at a couple case studies.. https://i.imgur.com/TBTF63h.png https://i.imgur.com/TBTF63h.png https://i.imgur.com/HP0DNNg.png https://i.imgur.com/HP0DNNg.png It looks / feels like stripe but without the brand recognition, I'd hope it's more cost effective than competitors but having to contact them for pricing doesn't inspire confidence. I also don't see how this is any more frictionless than competitors. On the flip side I'm a little blown away by how big the team is and how many jobs they have listed considering it's only launched a couple hours ago - whoever bank rolled this has a lot of faith. Congrats on the launch either way.
- rbres 9y agoThanks brod! Main differences: - Stripe = APIs to build your own payment stack. - Bolt = fully out of the box payments stack. Checkout that doesn't only do payments but also shipping/tax/user-auth. Also w/ 100% fraud coverage. Also to set the record a bit more clearly: we launched in stealth 1.5 years ago, have been moving $100Ms, and have dozens of case studies. Appreciate the kind words too!
- SkyPuncher 9y agoLast I checked Stripe does all of this - or at least offers a very parallel product.
- thenanyu 9y agoDo you deal with international duties and tax as well?
- rbres 9y agoHere's why we exist: https://bolt.com/case-studies https://bolt.com/case-studies
- amcnett 9y agoFraud liability absorbed by a service provider isn't "zero fraud." It is: "you don't get charged directly for chargebacks and other financial penalties, but your brand is still at risk, plus you have no control over false positives."
- rbres 9y agoTrue. But it's zero fraud from your perspective as a business. You also have full control over false positives: - First, we put txn's through several layers to ensure the highest rates of order approvals. If our algorithm is about to reject, it goes through a human review process to ensure we're approving as much as possible. - If we reject, you have a force approve time window to approve transactions if you disagree with our decision. You have final decision-making. None of our merchants use this because they end up trusting us so much :-) Our customers (some case studies here: https://bolt.com/case-studies https://bolt.com/case-studies) have switched from top-tier providers and seen substantial order approval lift. Furthermore, we're also your payment processor. Typically fraud providers and payment processors are separate, so if fraud providers make a mistake, payment processors will slap the merchant on the wrist with what can ultimately be serious fines + more reserve requirements. We don't, because we're also your processor.
- amcnett 9y agoSure, maybe you offer "zero fraud" from a chargebacks-line-item-on-the-balance-sheet perspective. The impacts of fraud on customers' perception of a company, and the effects those perceptions will have on the bottom line, however, can be significant. This is not say I assume your service is deficient in any way...the marketing is just a little snicker-inducing from someone like me who works in the field. The only sure way to have zero fraud is to turn off sales. Final control over force-approving rejected transactions is a nice feature on its face. I understand why your merchants don't use it...they'd have to soak the expense of paying someone to monitor accepts and rejects in an attempt to optimize sales (which is what they are paying you to do). If a merchant does not have full visibility into and control of their anti-fraud program (and the expertise to know what to do with it) approval/reject/false positive rates are always going to be in the hands of people who don't know their customers or business as well as the merchant does. That is why larger, mature businesses invest in anti-fraud people and technology. That's certainly a bridge too far for the typical small business, so services like Bolt can certainly deliver a ton of value. I just advise a merchant who thinks that just because they can't see fraud there isn't any impact to their business that they're missing a potentially crucial part of the picture.
- w0rd-driven 9y agoI have intermittent issues scrolling the fullstack job post (https://bolt.com/jobs/fullstack-engineer https://bolt.com/jobs/fullstack-engineer) in Chrome for iOS. Requesting the desktop site seemed to fix it. I was also able to get it working by randomly clicking the other postings and coming back. If I wasn't eating lunch I'd try to debug it better but it's easily possible this is only affecting my phone.
- rbres 9y agoLooking into this thanks.
- emarthinsen 9y agoSo........ did you get a little design inspiration from Stripe's site? Maybe changed that background to a dark color and toned down the nuance a bit?
- rbres 9y agoOur old, hidden URL site, had the slanted style for the last 2+ years before their redesign: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qM3lAjCdSuTPAU-R9S2THrD83ZdWjxQo/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qM3lAjCdSuTPAU-R9S2THrD83Zd... Is pretty consistent with our style today.
- slap_shot 9y agoJudging from Crunchbase[0], it looks like this company did a pretty interesting pivot: "Bolt is an online payments platform which allows users to make payments through digital currencies such as bitcoin. Bolt wants to give e-commerce retailers a better shot at competing with Amazon." Can anybody at Bolt talk about that transition? Why is there less focus on digital currencies? Any interesting success/failure stories of eccommerce companies using digital currencies? Always happy to hear about successful pivots. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bolt-5
- rbres 9y agoBig fans of crypto. I co-started the Stanford Bitcoin Group back in the day. Dropped out of school to re-engineer online payments originally inspired by crypto. We realized crypto's shortcomings in mainstream payments (after a valiant year long quest) when we also had an aha-moment about how to re-engineer traditional online payments. Thus, the Bolt you see today. News on crypto for online payments to come :-)
- thefounder 9y agoHow could they provide no fraudulent charge back? It's up to the bank and Visa not to the payment processor
- rbres 9y agoWe pay the cost on behalf of the merchant.
- falcolas 9y agoAm I reading the "acceptable user policy"[0] correctly in noting that any of the adult entertainment industries and those currently operating in the unknown at Patreon (Stripe), would likely not be welcome at Bolt either? [0] https://bolt.com/acceptable-use https://bolt.com/acceptable-use
- rbres 9y agoNothing in adult for now. I'm not sure what "those currently operating in the unknown" means. Hoping to expand to more business categories as we grow.
- leesalminen 9y agoI confused this for CardConnect’s Bolt P2PE product [0], which is also in the payments space. https://cardconnect.com/bolt https://cardconnect.com/bolt
- hdubugras 9y agoA friend of mine uses them and he says they increased his revenue by 40%!
- dawhizkid 9y agoConsumer identity fraud isn't the only type of fraud problem that needs to be solved from the payment processor POV - there's also friendly fraud (when the customer is actually the owner of the credit card but claims fraud anyway), merchant fraud (merchants setting up bad sites and trying to steal funds), and collusion between merchant and customer. It seems like Bolt is focused on solving the consumer identity fraud problem for merchants, but this biz models will 100% make them a huge target for fraudulent merchants to collude with customers to steal funds. I guess I don't see how even an additional low single digit % fee will make up for false negatives. Assuming the company keeps .5% of the standard payment processing fee + takes an additional ~3% in fees on top of that, a $1000 false negative would require $1000/(.035) = ~$28.5k in additional processing volume to breakeven. This doesn't even take into the account the fact Bolt will eat the chargeback fee passed on from the network, so merchants with high volume/low average order value (think digital goods) will be hugely expensive for Bolt to service given they're making pennies per transaction but potentially paying 10x+ that per chargeback.
- rbres 9y agoHey dawhizkid - totally right. Some comments on that in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216936 We vet our merchants before onboarding and make sure to work with high-integrity companies. We monitor orders not just for identity fraud, but for merchant / collusion fraud. That being said, we can certainly make mistakes. We also end up in the red some months with some clients. The good thing is that when we make a mistake, we pay the cost, not the merchant (which is contrary to the current state of the industry). We have made reasonable profit per client even with our costs, but the real winners are our clients driving millions in newfound revenue.
- dawhizkid 9y agoWhat's the source of truth for deciding whether it was friendly fraud or not? Is it the chargeback reason code? As far I know there isn't a specific reason code for "friendly fraud" (i.e. banks are passing along chargebacks telling you as a merchant that they think it's not actual fraud) and more often than not, especially having worked on this problem at scale in the past, friendly fraud chargebacks just come back with a "this is fraud" reason code.
- jccooper 9y agoLooks nice, but "get a quote" == "close tab".
- RageOn 9y agoI'm so excited to see Bolt redefine the payment space! If they can successfully defeat fraud, make it easier for customers to pay, AND integrate other payment methods, etc. - then this will be a BIG win!
- maslam 9y agoSpelling error in video is a big red flag for me. "Expidited" should be "expedited".
- cjbarber 9y agoExcited to see this launch. The Zero Fraud guarantee is particularly excellent!
- Advaith 9y agoI've been following bolt since the past few years, congratulations on the official launch!
- rbres 9y agoMany thanks!!
- throwawaylalala 9y agoWow, wish I could comment on my experience with them, but I think there was a NDA (and I dont have the contract at my fingertips).
- Redoubts 9y agoAre there any industries this product wont be working with (for example, adult video sites)?
- rbres 9y agoHere's a list: https://bolt.com/acceptable-use https://bolt.com/acceptable-use We hope to shorten the list as time goes on.
- WTFWORLD 9y agoBolt using Vantiv for their Payment Processing. They are part of Vantiv Payfac Program. I found it from my Friend.
- mcntsh 9y agoOur team did a pretty significant integration with Bolt last year. Their platform is solid and was straight forward to integrate with. Their development team was also extremely helpful and helped us through the process at every step we needed them. They really did go above and beyond for us.