Retail Decisions
Retail Decisions (ReD) is an international company specialising in payment fraud prevention and payment processing for ecommerce, mobile, mail order, telephone order, TV and face-to-face payment transactions. Its services are fully hosted and licenced and include: ReD Shield and PRiSM® for fraud prevention and ReD1 Gateway™, LiveProcessorTM and CardExpress™ payment gateway services. ReD has clients globally in the telecommunications, retail, travel, petroleum, gaming, banking and the broader e-commerce sectors. Its blue chip clients include Air China, Comet, John Lewis, Shell, Tesco Mobile, Chevron, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Walmart.
History
Retail Decisions was founded in January 2000 after the consolidation of existing fraud prevention and security company, Card Clear Plc.
CardClear Plc was formed in 1998 after the amalgamation of Card Clear UK, a card fraud prevention company in the retail sector, TBR, a card fraud prevention company operating in the Telecoms sector, Master Change, a niche bureau de change, HTEC, a manufacturer of information and retail systems and Inter Clear, a specialist in internet security services.
In January 2000 the decision to focus the business solely on payment fraud prevention led Card Clear to divest in Master Change, HTEC and Inter Clear. The newly consolidated company, renamed Retail Decisions Plc (ReD) continued operations with Card Clear in the UK and TBR in North America.
In May 2000 ReD launched its South African operation. In August 2000 it acquired the net assets of I.C.E Group Australia. Between 2001 and 2006 ReD continued its acquisitions with the rights to PRism technology, Motorchange Ltd, Payment Plus, Fuelserv and E com, taking its operations global.
Business today
Acquisition by Palamon
Retail Decisions was acquired by Palamon Capital Partners, LP in December 2006 in a public to private deal worth £186 million. At the time of the acquisition ReD operated four business units:
- Merchant Services – a global fraud prevention and payment processing business
- European Fuel Cards – an issuer of fuel cards across Europe that can be used to pay for fuel and related products
- Australian Fuel Cards – as Europe but the largest multi branded fuel card issuer in Australia
- Australian Prepaid Cards – the leading processor of prepaid gift cards in Australia
In 2006, ReD continued its global expansion acquiring Express Diesel, Liquidcard and Lomo Card Germany. The UK and Irish operations of the European Fuel Card business was sold to FleetCor Technologies Inc in August 2009. Proceeds were used to pay down external bank debt.
The two Australian businesses were sold to Wright Express Corporation, with completion occurring in September 2010. The proceeds of this sale allowed for repayment of all external bank debt and a distribution to institutional shareholders that repaid their original investment in the business from 2006.
Senior team
Paul Stanley |
Chief Executive Officer |
Clive Drysdale |
Group Finance Director |
Nick Walker |
Business Development Director |
Paul Avery |
Regional Director Australia and Asia Pacific] |
Manish Patel |
Regional Director Europe |
Kevin Sprake |
Regional Director North America |
Geographies
ReD has offices in Australia, China, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with representation in India, Korea, Japan, and South America.
Fraud Prevention Services
ReD Shield®
ReD Shield is a managed service which protects payment transactions that are accepted over the internet, via mail order, telephone order or through interactive TV from payment fraud. It works in multiple sectors and across international boundaries, and provides a real-time risk assessment recommendation which makes an instant decision on whether to accept or reject a payment transaction. ReD’s industry analysts work closely with clients to design and maintain risk strategies. Alongside the analysts, artificially intelligent neural networks detect behaviour and patterns. Customised complex rule sets are designed without limitation in numbers, and are constantly developed to protect the merchant from changing fraud trends as they occur.
Each transaction screened is cross referenced against ReD’s proprietary global databases containing millions of suspicious data elements. ReD also integrates third party services for client device identification, public records checking, access to credit bureaus, access to authentication services and local industry negative databases.
Neural Networks - PRISM®
PRISM® is a suite of products offering neural network systems which are designed to monitor and make decisions on large amounts of data inputs. ReD offers these solutions on a licensed or outsourced basis and tailors them to provide predictive fraud detection for credit, debit and private-label cards, as well as retail fraud, e-commerce and money laundering.
PRISM® fraud detection applications include: PRISM® Merchant, PRISM® Credit, PRISM® Debit, PRISM® Money Laundering Detection (MLD) and PRISM® Application.