MarTech Edge Interview with Armen Najarian, Chief Marketing Officer, Sift

Congrats on joining as the CMO at Sift. What will be your approach to developing brand strategy and team building?

I believe that building a strong brand and a strong team both require a human-centered approach.

When it comes to team building, I want to make sure that every person with a seat at the table has a voice. Having a clear understanding of every person’s role and strengths is the first step in creating an environment where everyone’s perspectives and skills contribute to our shared goals as a team and a company. I also believe that having (and hiring for) people with diverse backgrounds and experiences is incredibly valuable, allowing for more creative problem-solving and, ultimately, better business outcomes.

The foundational aspect of building a strong brand for a company like Sift is starting with the product—is it innovative, and how does it fit into the market? But as a brand strategist, it’s equally important to have a good understanding of the human needs, challenges, and motivations of your target audience. Everyone is a consumer, even in a B2B environment. Thinking about the human side of the problem our product is trying to solve helps us understand how best to position the brand in a way that meaningfully speaks to potential customers.

You have been a marketing leader for over 2 decades in various fraud prevention & identity protection companies; which significant shifts have you witnessed over this period?

The biggest, and perhaps most obvious, change has been the technological advances that have brought both consumers and fraudsters into the digital space. Consumer spending has shifted almost entirely online for many products and services, while fraudsters have found they are able to exploit the security gaps of newly digital (or digital-native) businesses. Fraud has also become democratized—even first-time fraudsters can now easily find the tools and resources readily available on the deep and dark web to steal from businesses and consumers.

Both business operators and the fraud & identity sector have had to keep up, and those who have failed to adapt to new fraud techniques and patterns are diluting their profits, failing to grow, or shutting down altogether. Embracing technologies (like machine learning) and a new approach has been necessary to adapt to effectively fight fraud. Unfortunately, while fraudsters have taken advantage of new technologies, many organizations’ fraud operations remain stuck in the past, working with disconnected teams and disparate data and relying on legacy fraud prevention systems and manual review. I believe that, slowly but surely, business and fraud prevention companies are starting to understand the importance of converging their cybersecurity, identity, and fraud detection efforts and seeing fraud detection as a key element of business health and growth.

How do you ensure alignment on the marketing goals across different departments?

There are three things marketing leaders must prioritize to ensure alignment across departments, especially in larger organizations:

1. First, make sure to align marketing goals with the overall strategic goals of the company;

2. Educate and collaborate: Make sure that everyone at the company understands how marketing advances the overall company goals and encourage and facilitate open communication between departments and stakeholders to ensure everyone is aligned;

3. Share successes (and failures): Regularly update the company on marketing achievements, from pipeline metrics to client stories and PR wins.

How do Sift’s payment fraud-fighting solutions differ from the others?

In a crowded market filled with single-point solutions, the Sift platform stands out not only for its ability to be a single, flexible, and comprehensive fraud solution but also for its unrivaled global data network, which processes over 1 trillion events annually. Sift processes data across more than 34k sites and apps, categorizing them into thousands of fraud signals, which means we’re able to identify a new attack pattern across our customer base within 250 milliseconds.

Another key differentiator is the high degree of transparency and control that Sift customers have when it comes to how they use our platform. Some fraud solutions in the market right now operate like a ‘black box’ by making fraud prevention decisions for merchants without accounting for the complexity of rapidly changing fraud patterns or the needs of the specific business. Sift lets customers take back control by providing customizable and adjustable tools and highly accurate insights into abuse patterns.

These types of capabilities are becoming increasingly necessary for any business trying to stay ahead of a rapidly changing fraud environment.

Please tell us more about PSD2 & the Sift platform on how they extend the power of digital trust & maximize revenue.

The Second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) is an important regulatory step in creating more open and secure online payments, but it hasn’t come without challenges for businesses. Merchants who have to abide by the new Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) rules as part of PSD2 may find themselves struggling with providing their customers with increased friction in the user journey, which can be off-putting to trusted customers.

This is where a platform like Sift can be valuable; our ‘dynamic friction’ approach applies safeguards only to suspicious transactions and activity while allowing legitimate users to bypass these additional defenses for a smoother online experience.

Ultimately, as with any such regulations, PSD2 should not be the only solution businesses rely on to prevent fraud. A robust fraud prevention platform, combined with appropriate regulations, can be a powerful deterrent to fraud.

How do you think the current economic downturn will affect fraud & identity protection technology platforms, and how do you plan to overcome these challenges?

Fraudsters are opportunists, and judging from fraud spikes during recent downturns, we can safely predict that they will take advantage of economic instability to ramp up their attacks. The fraud prevention technologies that will emerge on top are solutions that are fast, flexible, and efficient when it comes to detecting and preventing attacks but, just as importantly, capable of creating smooth experiences for trusted users. Sift’s approach goes beyond seeing fraud prevention as limited to a single department or budget item—our primary aim is to provide both security and enable business growth.