Vlog: 1Kosmos and RSA/Outseer Partnership with Armen Najarian and Michael Cichon
1Kosmos CMO, Michael Cichon, and Outseer CMO, Armen Najarian, discuss the 1Kosmos and RSA/Outseer partnership in their recent vlog.
Michael Cichon:
Welcome to the 1Kosmos video log. Armen Najarian, Chief Marketing Officer at Outseer. How are you this afternoon?
Armen Najarian:
Doing great, Mike. Thanks for having me on your show.
Michael Cichon:
So I know that brand building has become very popular for marketers that put on their resume. You’ve done this a couple times now. I think people in our personal networks will recognize both of us as being a few of the principles behind the threat metrics and the Agari brand relaunches, and then part of the teams that work very hard to get those companies to a successful exit. You’ve done it once again at Outseer. A few months ago, you helped launch Outseer as a independent business. How is that going so far?
Armen Najarian:
It’s going very well. We actually just passed the 90 day post launch milestone and all the KPIs were very, very positive. Our share of voice was quite strong. It was close to 50% against some couple big competitors. So we’re very happy with it. To the broader point, as a marketer, as a CMO, you don’t get many opportunities to have a clean slate scenario where you can define and, and shape a new identity and bring that to market, especially for a hundred million dollar business. So it’s been a fun journey.
Michael Cichon:
It’s an art and a science and from the outside world, it looks like it’s going very well. So congratulations early stages on that launch. I know that your product offerings are varied. You have three different products, I think. Can you talk a little bit about your product lines?
Armen Najarian:
Yeah. Yeah. So just very brief, so Outseer is in the business of fraud prevention and specifically majoring on payments authentication, and yes, we do have a portfolio of three offerings. Offering number one is called Outseer 3D Secure, and that’s a standards based payment authentication capability. That’s used globally by many large card issuing banks. Product number two is Outseer Fraud Action, which is a managed service really where on behalf of big brands around the world, we monitor for brand abuse. That includes fake social media accounts, fake rogue mobile apps, fake websites, and we monitor and then execute takedowns against that to preserve their brand integrity. And the third offering is called Outseer Fraud Manager, which historically you might have known as RSA adaptive authentication. So we shortened the name, put the word fraud in it, and that’s our capability where we provide effectively a risk based authentication capability for a variety of transaction types, and digital experiences.
Michael Cichon:
Awesome. Awesome. So this third product Fraud Manager, this is the product where 1Kosmos has now announced a partnership or we’ve announced a joint partnership with Outseer. And one of the use cases that we’re supporting now is the account enrollment. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of this use case to Outseer?
Armen Najarian:
Yeah, very important use case. And it goes without saying, especially during the past year and a half digital onboarding, digital experiences, including enrollment right? Customers that might even have an existing relationship with a digital service have been proliferating, right? There’s a pronounced level of engagement through digital channels. Outseer now has a capability to support account enrollment with many of the large banks that we work with around the world. So the scenario might be, it might be a bank. There’s an existing relationship with a customer and Outseer now has the ability to streamline introducing new digital services to that same customer and enroll them into new parts of the business. So we’re very excited about that new use case.
Michael Cichon:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. There’s a second use case and it’s around strong customer authentication, presumably around step ups. Can you touch on that?
Armen Najarian:
Absolutely! I mean we’ve all seen this, that the fraud actors have been very, very busy over the past couple of years, and especially as more and more accounts are online, there’s more and more value, stored value, in accounts, credential theft is now at an all time high. And so yes, having a stronger mechanism to prevent the account takeover is really our main interest here. We had great capabilities and now through this relationship, we have a different set of capabilities to really stop the ATO, using some new signals around biometrics. And we’re very excited about that. It’s just a new level of value that we can offer to our customer community.
Michael Cichon:
That’s great. Is there anything special that this partnership telegraphs to the market about Outseer?
Armen Najarian:
Well, I will say we’re a hundred million dollar business and we’ve got customers around the world and we serve a lot of great value and we can’t possibly build everything that we need on our own. Right? And so there are going to be some scenarios like this, where we can work with partners that have great capabilities to plug some holes and deliver more value to our customers.
Michael Cichon:
Well, that’s really, really cool stuff. Listen I’m really delighted that our paths have crossed again, to have 1Kosmos add strong identity and strong authentication to your product line is just a thrill for me. And that’s going to be real exciting for me to put my best foot forward, to see how much value we can add to your business. So again, congratulations on the launch and looking forward to continued success in the future.
Armen Najarian:
Yes. I will say, yeah, working together consecutively three companies in a row is kind of remarkable, Mike, that we’ve done this. So it is exciting. And now that we’re partnering like this, it’s a different way to work together. I think the alignment that I’m seeing between the two companies, even at the senior levels is very real and very exciting. So yeah, thank you for your partnership.
Michael Cichon:
Thanks Armen.
