The ubiquitous influence of mobiles in every domain of today's business is unquestionable. One of those areas is banking and financial sector where we can see exponential increase in the number of mobiles being used. While the use of mobiles is making every transaction faster and easier, the major concern for the financial institutions and e-commerce merchants is the authentication of users. Banks have set strong terms and conditions to avoid fraudulent activities and such strict guidelines sometimes restrain even the authentic customers from using the services.


The lack of methods for detection of fraudulent accesses has attracted startups like Zighra to fill this void. Zighra is an emerging leader in the crowdsourced mobile authentication space. It builds solutions that use the potential of mobile technology and the intelligence shared by consumers to reduce the costs of fraudulent transactions. The company was founded in 2009 by Deepak Dutt who is the current CTO of the company.


The company has won many accolades such as being featured in the list of top three companies for 2013 Globalizer of the year award. It was also named as one of the startups to watch in 2013, by Ottawa Business Journal.

The Inception

The idea has its roots in Boston where Dutt was at the airport and he wanted to buy a gift for his wife. He tried one credit card after other, but all were declined over fraud concerns. He tried calling his credit card companies but to no avail. This incident lead to him realizing that several people were going through the same ordeal. From banks to merchants and call centers , everyone suffers a loss either in terms of cost or time. He saw an opportunity that he wanted to leverage and thus came up with an idea for a product which could address such issues and lower the frequency of recurrence of the same in future. This brainchild of Dutt took the form of their flagship product, ZfraudShield. It is a fraud-risk intervention solution which enables banks and financial institutions to battle fraud and build trust.

Modus Operandi

Zighra serves the financial institutions and e-commerce merchants. The product is customized to cater to both groups in an efficient manner utilizing its expertise. For the financial institutions, Zighra provides out-of-band two factor authentication to help with security, fraud prevention, and chargeback mitigation. Through its products, the company helps businesses determine the true identity of their customers and as a result, the clients are able to take full advantage of their e-commerce capabilities without sacrificing profits to credit card chargeback fees and lost products or services.


Zighra provides services to its clients on the SaaS model. It works on a subscription based paradigm like a monthly subscription for various transactions. The flagship product sends transactions through a verification system that detects the fraudulent attribute of a particular purchase, if it has any. The clients can then send an alert message to the retail customer's mobile phone that allows the merchant to double-check the identity of the buyer.

Differentiating Factors

The banking and financial sector bleeds out well over $100 billion every year from fraudulent transactions. Current fraud solutions still cannot resolve the high false positive rates that cause extreme inconveniences to cardholders and are unable to rule out merchant dissatisfaction. Zighra scores over others by using mobile network intelligence and crowdsourcing to help financial institutions eliminate at least 35 percent of their losses, saving them over $3.5 billion annually. "We are excited to demonstrate the unique features of ZfraudShield including its unique user interface, its ability to be deployed on any mobile banking app, and its role in harnessing the collective intelligence of consumers to fight fraud," states Dutt. Use of crowdsourcing is very productive as the customers can flag the transactions as fraudulent and the collective intelligence which keeps growing with every transaction serves the new users, who in turn also join the brigade.

Zighra Inc is proud to have a group of telephony engineers with a lot of networking intelligence. These engineers work to authenticate users without interrupting them. For example there are some messages which the user cannot avoid. So, the authentication is done before encryption to prevent any hindrance to the work of customer.

Future Prospects

The mobile fraud and authentication market worldwide is set to grow exponentially with the explosion of mobile payments and commerce. By 2015, consumers worldwide are estimated to buy $1.3 trillion worth of goods with their phones and tablets—four times the amount today, forecasts Juniper Research. Dutt realizes it and aims to increase international presence of the company with an objective of making the entire authentication process visible. "We decided to go global from day one," says Dutt. Today the company also has presence in the Middle East, Singapore and Asia. The company hopes to play a protagonist in this rapidly growing market of crowdsourced mobile authentication space worldwide.