Once the calendar flips to the new year the opportunities ahead of us often take a back seat to the achievements behind us. At Kount, we have great expectations for 2012 primarily because of the record-breaking progress we made last year in adding customers, growing our business, setting the pace for our industry and adding a number of enhancements to our fraud-fighting platform. 

Strategic Partnerships

Obviously our success begins and ends with the customers and partners who use our platform to minimize risk and increase sales. Those who joined us in 2011 span 11  key industries ranging from digital and physical e-commerce to gaming, telecommunications and insurance. These industry leaders include: 

• Lime Light CRM, the most trusted CRM provider in the online markets
• Lexis Nexis, global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions
• Vindicia, a leading provider of SaaS billing solutions
• Polk Audio, a world leader and award-winning designer and manufacturer of high performance audio products
• Zoovy, the leader in success driven e-commerce software for online businesses
• Magento, developer of the world’s fastest-growing eCommerce platform

Company Growth

Adding these partnerships set the pace for one of our best years ever.  We more than tripled our customer base and increased annual sales by 364%.  As customers increased and sales grew, we also expanded our global reach.  At the end of 2011 Kount was helping its customers extend risk analysis data monitoring to more than 180 countries across the globe.

Industry Leadership & Influence

While Kount's fully-owned and integrated platform is not a new development, the uniqueness of our solution and the fact that we pioneered numerous aspects of the fraud tools in use today was further reinforced in 2011.  Kount received four patent allowances last year alone, bringing our total number to thirteen pending patent applications related to fraud prevention and detection technologies. This includes system identification, data collection, credential verification, payment fraud control and risk analysis with more applications set to be filed in early 2012. Here are the specific patent milestones for 2011:

• U.S. patent number 13,096,673 “Establishing Unique Sessions For DNS Subscribers” – Paves the way for using characteristics of Domain Name Service (DNS) protocols to secure access to content on the Internet.
• U.S. patent number 8,024,266 “Method for Secure, Closed-Loop Money Transfer Via Electronic Mail” - Enabling secure money transfers over the Internet via email, adding an additional eight claims to bolster several other Kount patents in the security and fraud prevention space.
• U.S. patent number 7,958,246 “Establishing Unique Sessions for DNS Subscribers” – Related to device fingerprinting, involving uniquely identifying a set of services linked to a specific device through its use of the Domain Naming Service (DNS) – a completely new way to identify and track activity not easily manipulated, blocked or masked by the user.
• U.S. patent number 7,937,467 “Online Machine Data Collection and Archiving Process” - Describes the generation and analysis of a machine data profile of a customer computer accessing a merchant website. In addition to creating a device fingerprint, the technology “pierces” through anonymizing proxies to detect the true IP address and geolocation of the customer computer. The technology also links the customer identity profile with other online transactions looking for suspicious or otherwise fraudulent activity across a large number of transaction attempts, all in real-time.

Additionally, Kount and its leadership team gained regional and national recognition for its influence at industry conferences and through high level appointments. 

• Kount showcased its industry-leading platform at the MRC 2011 Annual Conference, highlighting the industry’s only money back guarantee for those merchants in the excessive chargeback program
• We were recognized as a key sponsor of the prestigious MasterCard Academy of Risk Management (ARM) Conference in San Diego
• Our team discussed the latest innovations in fraud and risk strategies with international merchants in Barcelona during the second annual European e-Commerce Payments and Risk Conference by Merchant Risk Council (MRC) 
• The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco named Kount CEO Brad Wiskirchen as the new Director of its Salt Lake City Branch, effective January 1, 2011
• Already a founding member of the Idaho Technology Council, Vice President of IT Operations Rich Stuppy was appointed as its Vice Chairman
• Kount Marketing Director Don Bush was recently appointed to lead the Communications Committee of the Merchant Risk Council

Platform Enhancements

Last but definitely not least, we continued to extend the functionality of our risk management and fraud-fighting solution. We enhanced features across each of our platform’s core components with Kount Complete® Platform version 4.4, including Strategy Management, Operational Management and Fraud Screening. We also developed an enterprise fraud solution to meet the needs of small to medium sized businesses called Kount SMB™, which is now available through a network of channel partners.

Clearly 2011 was an exciting year for Kount, but we're just getting started.  Be sure to keep tabs on our latest announcements here and look for exciting initiatives throughout the year such as our free device identification and other developments.  Above all, we hope you and your company achieve all of your 2012 goals and that you think of Kount when it comes to boosting sales and beating fraud.