Raise is the world's largest gift card exchange, connecting millions of buyers and sellers across more than 1,000 global brands. Over the past decade, Raise has successfully processed more than $10 billion in transactions for its 6 million users. Originally founded in the US, the company has since expanded internationally into the UK and Canada.

Raise was handling billions in transactions when they noticed a growing problem. Fraudsters were increasingly targeting their platform, and their team was spending too much time manually reviewing orders. 

Since partnering with Sardine three years ago, Raise has cut chargebacks by 45% and have reduced manual reviews from 18% of transactions to just 0.25%. This means faster service for their 6 million customers and more time for their team to focus on growth as they expand into new markets.

We've loved working with the team at Raise, but to find out more about their experience with us, we talked to Raise's Risk Supervisor, Dartanion Wells. 

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Challenge: Chargebacks & manual reviews

The gift card industry is a prime target for fraudsters. Its digital nature, high liquidity, and resale potential make gift cards particularly attractive to scammers looking for quick profits.

Raise was facing a specific and growing problem: chargeback fraud. Scammers would purchase gift cards, use them, and then fraudulently dispute the transactions to get their money back – essentially getting the value for free while Raise absorbed the loss.

"Chargebacks were becoming a significant drain on our revenue. At our peak, we were seeing disputes on about 1 in every 200 transactions. It doesn't sound like much, but when you’re processing millions of transactions, those losses add up quickly. And that doesn’t take into account the operational costs of investigating those transactions. " — Dartanion Wells, Risk Supervisor at Raise

Initially, Raise was managing chargeback fraud with a homegrown, in-house system. While this worked in the early days, the more they scaled, the harder it was to keep up:

• Manual reviews had grown to 15-18% of all transactions
• Each review took between 15 minutes and 24 hours to complete
• Over 10,000 hours per year were being spent just on manual reviews
• Customers were waiting longer for their purchases to be approved

"Our customers expect zero friction when buying or selling gift cards. But delivering that smooth experience became harder when our alert queue became unmanageable. We had customers waiting approvals while our team worked through a large backlog of flagged transactions. If someone is buying a gift card, they want it right away. They're not going to wait 24 hours." — Dartanion Wells

Lowering chargeback rates by 45%

To bring down fraudulent chargebacks, Raised partnered with Sardine to optimize their rulesets for better detection, and train custom ML models to detect specific gift card-related schemes.

"What made Sardine stand out was their willingness to build something tailored to our specific needs. They took the time to understand our existing processes and business requirements, before making recommendations.” — Dartanion Wells

Steadily, the chargeback rate dropped from more than one in every two hundred (0.53%) transactions to less than one in every three hundred transactions (0.29%). It's a win for profitability. 

Reducing manual reviews by 98%

One of the most impactful benefits of using Sardine has been greater operational efficiency. With the support of Sardine’s AI features, Raise has reduced manual reviews by 98% – from 15-18% of transactions to just 0.25%.

“Surprisingly, automation also helped us cut down false positives because it reduces the human error you get when you’re making judgment calls during an investigation.”

For Dartanion, the software also had another unintended benefit. Training a software program to the highest level once, is a lot easier than training many people, many times.

What's next for Raise + Sardine? 

Raise and Sardine are proud partners, always striving to continue improving results, as well as staying ahead of the scammers. The beauty of Sardine’s technology is that partners can make the service their own, with rules suited to their unique business risks. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution. 

As we look forward to an exciting future, we'd like to thank Dartanion and Raise for their continued support and partnership. It's truly been a pleasure to work beside such expert innovators.