Vindicia provides on-demand billing and fraud management solutions. Among its customers are Online Buddies, SpeedDate, Avid Life (Ashley Madison) and other large dating sites.  Chairman and CEO of Vindicia - Gene Hoffman answers our questions in today’s exclusive interview for the readers of DatingAdNetwork blog:

Q: How can dating sites benefit from Vindicia CashBox?

A: Vindicia CashBox is an on-demand billing solution that enables dating sites, big and small, to continually acquire and retain customers.  From the acquisition perspective, CashBox supports multiple payment methods and payment processors; handles numerous business models, including subscriptions, one-time payments, and hybrids; calculates the applicable taxes (sales tax, GST, VAT) through a built-in engine; and automates the process of managing and disputing chargebacks.  On the retention side, in particular, CashBox features automatic payment-retry logic, which helps subscription clients consistently raise their successful transaction rate every month by 1-2 percent.  In addition, with CashBox, dating sites can communicate with customers in multiple languages, a win-win for global outreach.

In short, CashBox manages the entire billing process for dating sites so that they can focus on their business of helping people find that special someone.

Q: How does CashBox differ from other billing solutions?

A: CashBox delivers many distinct advantages besides automation of the order-to-cash process. Most of all, CashBox helps clients optimize their customer acquisition and retention capabilities, resulting in boosts to customer lifetime values north of 10 percent annually.  No other billing solution manages chargebacks as effectively as CashBox, which tackles the friendly-fraud challenge that all dating sites face and rightfully returns revenue due them.

Typically, Vindicia wins 60-70 percent of the chargebacks that we dispute on clients’ behalf.  CashBox also provides our clients with a great deal of flexibility and versatility with its support for multiple business models, global payment methods, languages, and currencies. With CashBox, dating sites can quickly respond to evolving business conditions without having to wait for their billing infrastructure to catch up.

Q: Many payment processors are averse to dating sites and consider them a high risk. Why are you interested in working with them?

A: We’ve found that dating sites that take appropriate risk-mitigation measures for fraud are, in fact, high-margin businesses and ideal for the services offered by CashBox. Since many sites have as a goal notto retain customers for too long (after all, their success is defined as /not /needing a dating site), a simple, transparent, robust, and logical billing and payment service is a key facet of a satisfactory customer experience.  Bottom line: We believe that we can help dating sites grow their business and stay successful through our unique approach of building online revenue.

Q: Tell us more about your fraud-screening and chargeback management capabilities.

A: CashBox’s fraud-screening capability generates a risk score for each sales transaction so that dating sites can identify obvious fraudsters before the transaction is complete.  Many variables are factored into the risk score, including the geographical location of the customer’s IP address, validation of the billing address and BIN, detection of the related proxy, and card velocity.  Unique to the fraud-screening score is a database of chargebacks that we’ve created across a broad client base on the basis of hundreds of millions of past transactions.  As soon as CashBox detects that a credit card has been associated with a prior chargeback in our system, CashBox raises the risk score of the related transaction–essentially a red flag.

Chargeback management with CashBox comes into play post-transaction.  Oftentimes, chargebacks do not result from stolen credit cards or “true fraud,” but from people who make purchases but decide not to pay for them.  We call this behavior “friendly fraud” though it certainly isn’t.  For those cases, CashBox takes the chargeback data from the payment processor and maps it to usage and other pertinent information from the client site.  CashBox then creates a documentation package and a letter tailored for the customer’s issuing bank and “re-presents” the charge.  Aside from the positive impact of reversed revenue, our experience has shown that fighting chargebacks also provides our clients with valuable insight into their marketing efforts.

Q: Which dating sites are using CashBox?

A: There are quite a few, including Online Buddies, SpeedDate, iChurch, Avid Life, and others. They are either using or in the process of implementing CashBox.