Google Pay Risk Strategy

As users adopt new digital payments solutions, they are also falling prey to various scams. With increasing feature complexity, it is imperative for GPay to invest in user awareness and loss protections.

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THE CHALLENGE

Evolving scam landscape

Our goal is to understand business problems and user insights that lead to product teams unmet support needs, and collaboratively develop a vision that will best solve the underlying challenges, rather than focusing on band-aid fixes as an when problem arises.

Anyone can be a victim for scam

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MY ROLE

I led and propose creative strategies to combat evolving social engineering scams from early 2020 ~ 2023.

In addition, I worked alongside with a UX team (Visual, Content, Motion, Research), a group of front-end and back-end engineers, a product manager, the Risk Team and Trust and Safety team.

The strategy was released early 2020, supported by creative solutions throughout my time in the team. One of the solution was featured in Google for India, Dec 2022.

Google for India, Dec 2022 feature

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KICK OFF

EARLY INSIGHTS

It is never the users fault; anyone can be scammed. It is not attribued to their digital literacy or experience. Common traits of these users falling for scam:

Looked for help outside of GPay ecosystem.
Connected with scammers through other platforms (WhatsApp; Marketplace app).
Guided and led on phone by a person.

Digital payments landscape is facing evolving threat patterns and we need to combat, detect threads, adapt risk models and move fast. Lack of clarity of features leads to the rise of social engineering attacks.

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DEEPER INSIGHTS

Current experiences

GPay is getting more features, and it's not easy for users to keep up with it. We looked at the 3 stages of scam, and narrow down on different strategies to combat different areas.

3 stages of scam

Before: Training wheels

New feature hand holding,

in-journey contextual support

During: Smart friction

Warning to give user awareness

After: Community Proofing

Enable users to take action to help one another

Smart Friction

*Due to risk implications, 2 solutions that have been public facing are presented

Level 3 Friction: Delaying next action

As most users rushes through payment and do not read, with the right risk signal to understand whether the transaction could be potentially risky, we surface a count-down dialog and introduced a pause.

Level 4 Friction: Stop

For extreme risk cases such as opening an app that exposes users to vulnerable information to a third-party, we stop users from proceeding before they close them.

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HOW WE GOT THERE

Sprints, multiple research testings, scam trends

In APAC, the scams are relatively similar, and

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SPRINTS IN DIFFERENT REGIONS

The trends and concerns of users stays the same even in different regions, and we tested the concepts used/launched in India, in different markets to get a sense of how users will react to the solutions introduced.

SOLUTIONS FOR EACH STAGE

We identify the different state of mind different set of users group will be going through when interacting with each solution. Working together with a content writer, we set the tone and manner for each level, and tested it in research to validate what emotions each stage could bring to a user.

4 levels of friction to inform solutions in each stage

Level 1

Re-direction

A lightweight approach to focus on a repeat action without additional UI

Level 2

Re-confirmation

We reconfirm user's intention of performing a task with an additional layer of security

Level 3

Pause

Instill caution by introudcing a pause for users to be alerted to an otherwise repeitive and intutive process

Level 4

Stop

With high confience, trigger a total blocker to establish low dual task interference, to perform an action before proceeding

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FEATURES

Google for India 2022 December

Safer with Google Campaign 2021

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THE IMPACT

India: Launched risk warning messages during Payflow, significantly reduced the number of P2P transactions to scammers when warning is shown.
Resilient and creative problem solver in pursuing new initiative and securing funding: Launch more entry point for reporting, improved report completion rate, improving the signals to identify bad actors
Continuously working with Trust and Safety team to learn more on current fraud problems, and contribute to the submission of a publication to be shared Google Research.
Drove visibility and led vision of Scam education by winning Payments Hackathon 2021 with pitch deck. Started out as an idea from Risk 2021 deck that needed further buy-in and prioritisation.
Validated comprehensive design system with a series of rolling research, further reconfirming solutions viability for users that increase product value.

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