A Chat with Alisdair Faulkner, CEO and Founder at Digital Security Company: Darwinium

Darwinium is the company I have been building my whole life. I am always thinking about ways to make the digital world safer and fairer for all, and I have a particular passion for protecting those least able to protect themselves.

Darwinium is the realization of that vision; a next-generation digital security and fraud prevention platform running on the perimeter edge, protecting every customer interaction from fraud, scams, and online abuse. It’s a game changer for the industry because it brings together security and fraud teams by creating a continuous view of customer journeys across every digital touchpoint – Web, Apps and APIs.

This removes the siloes that fraudsters typically exploit, and places the ability to adapt and mitigate risk in the hands of businesses. Our customers can combine advanced fraud analytics with customer journey orchestration to make better risk decisions, and take real-time action on evolving threats.

How did you come up with the idea for the company? And what makes it unique?

The key challenge we were hearing from the industry, across leading eCommerce merchants and financial services organizations globally, was that despite having a security or fraud solution in place at every touchpoint, fraud was still getting through. And worse, fraudsters were winning the arms race because they could adapt faster, and attack smarter with the help of AI tooling. Put simply, fraud was becoming more complex, and existing tooling was not keeping pace.

Darwinium was born out of this landscape and has been created to integrate simply, adapt quickly, and mitigate risk in real time, with a keen eye on helping businesses future-proof against evolving AI attacks.

Darwinium’s unique integration point, running on the perimeter edge via Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), provides a continuous view of user behavior, from pre-authentication, through account creation, login, change-of-details, and payments, all via one simple deployment.

It removes the reliance on ‘point-in-time’ API-based solutions that are vulnerable to exploitation via operational siloes and disjointed risk assessments.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Darwinium is a company with a big vision and we have built, and are continuing to build, the team to deliver it. The last two years have focused on delivering the edge deployment vision across Content Delivery Network platforms and adding product capabilities that are market-leading.

One of the key innovations we have invested in and are really excited about is our proprietary Digital Signatures. These essentially offer a way of condensing high-variance data into bitmaps, that can be compared for similarity. They offer a shortcut to risk assessment that doesn’t need analysis of extensive rulesets or models, by checking whether something now has a similar match to a previous journey and outcome.

It’s a game changer for the industry because it allows businesses to access a similarity threshold that can be scaled up or down according to risk their own appetite.

Rather than focus on flagging anomalies, digital signatures are focused on finding patterns of behavior that can be compared for trust or risk.

AI is changing the way fraudsters operate in several sectors, including eCommerce/payments. How are you tackling these developments?

It’s a great question and one that comes up in almost every customer and prospect conversation right now. What is the risk from AI-facilitated attacks and how can I mitigate this risk now, and in the future?

Fraudsters are already using machine-learning models to circumvent defenses that companies put in place to spot fraud. We are also witnessing attacks that make use of generative AI tooling and deepfake technology to make scams and social engineering attacks or content fraud more convincing and realistic.

One of the biggest challenges here is that organizations lack the visibility of AI-based threats, and when they do experience attacks, they lack the agility and tooling required to mitigate attacks in real time.

Darwinium has been built to accurately separate trusted behavior from malicious intent in real time. Regardless of the sophistication or speed of AI-facilitated attacks, they leave a trail or pattern of behavior that is very different to a trusted interaction.

This is why our platform looks at intent across the entire digital journey – is this interaction trusted or malicious based on holistic intelligence related to devices, locations, behaviors, network information and even behavioral biometrics data.

When it comes to malicious AI, Darwinium provides continuous assessment of a user journey to identify high-risk behavior and machine-generated anomalies that warrant further review.

What can we hope to see from Darwinium in the future?

Our team has a collective passion for social equitability and is living out its vision to make the digital world safe, fair, and accessible to everyone in society. We are focused on protecting all users, including new-to-digital and vulnerable customers, from the risk of fraud and scams. We passionately believe that regardless of advances in fraud attacks and social engineering, providing businesses with full visibility of every digital interaction, and the power to decision, and act on what they see in real time, will better protect their end users.

Fraud analysts and data scientists can train, test, and deploy machine learning models without risk, removing reliance on black-box scores. Customer journeys can be configured and customized from within the Darwinium portal, without relying on engineering or IT resource to update a web page. Risk decisions can be enriched with any third-party intelligence, via no-code, custom-code, and app store for in-built integrations. And then because of our integration point at the perimeter edge, businesses can tailor user journeys live, by either reducing friction, or blocking, redirecting or stepping-up users according to trust / risk.

Unlike Charles Darwin’s legacy, Darwinium’s motto is ‘Survival of the Unfittest’; protecting those least able to protect themselves and ensuring everyone has access to the best defenses we can build.