Each data breach brings new learnings. Often we gain more insight in where the vulnerabilities lie within businesses and sometimes we gain a better understanding of how consumers can better protect themselves. These discoveries help us in our goal to better secure the business environment from all angles.
That’s why we’re proud to announce a collaboration that will enable us to reinvent identity protection. Experian® Data Breach Resolution and BillGuard, a leading finance security company, together will better protect consumers during this era of rampant identity theft with an advanced identity protection suite. The offering now allows data breach ProtectMyID members to access their ProtectMyID features along with BillGuard’s award-winning card fraud monitoring mobile application all in one place.
The need for products and tools to help consumers monitor their cards is clear. Aite Group reports that more than 40 percent of American consumers have experienced card fraud in the past five years. Fraudulent use of compromised credit and debit cards accounts for more than 85 percent of all identity theft, which causes nearly $25 billion in financial damage in the United States each year. It is not uncommon for both the financial institution and the customer to often fail to detect payment card fraud, which means that the cardholder ultimately absorbs the financial loss.
We are proud that Experian’s ProtectMyID has been the consumer protection solution of choice for several national brands that have experienced a data breach. For all types of breaches, PMID has been offered to victims with features such as credit report access, daily credit monitoring, identity theft resolution, identity theft insurance, internet scanning, and more. While checking a credit report is one of the best ways to detect identity theft and fraud, adding access to BillGuard’s suite of protection features results in even quicker and denser protection coverage.
BillGuard’s mobile application utilizes crowdsourcing techniques and big data analytics to identify suspicious activity at the individual transaction level for the benefit of all users. It provides data breach alerts if a card has been used at a retailer during a breach period and also alerts when a card is used away from the owner’s smart phone, indicating the card is probably not being used by its owner. Effectively, BillGuard enables consumers to vigilantly monitor their financial accounts at the transaction level on a daily basis.
The impact of identity theft is minimized when instances of theft are immediately identified, and potentially compromised accounts are monitored on an ongoing basis. By providing access to BillGuard’s best-of-breed card fraud monitoring technology with a data breach ProtectMyID membership, we are bringing consumers the most comprehensive identity theft and payment card protection in the market in one place.