Belfast-based Signifyd has seen its new research and development (R&D) centre grow faster than expected. This has contributed to the Silicon Valley-headquartered company’s ability to launch an unprecedented number of products in the past nine months.
The global ecommerce fraud protection firm announced its Northern Ireland R&D centre in February with a plan to hire 150 employees.
With its current Belfast headcount of over 60, Signifyd CEO and co-founder Raj Ramanand said: “The depth of the Northern Ireland talent pool has outstripped our high expectations, meaning we’ve been able to fill crucial jobs at a pace that has allowed us to extend our leading position in the industry.”
The Belfast team has helped fuel the growth that led to Signifyd being recognised as one of North America’s fastest-growing innovation companies, landing the company on the 2019 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list.
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Signifyd marked the progress by hosting an opening ceremony for the expanded R&D centre, housed at River House in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. The centre provides technical innovation and support for features and products serving Signifyd’s customers worldwide. To mark the opening, Silicon Valley business leaders, including Ramanand, joined with Belfast managers to celebrate the milestone.
Developers and technical teams in Northern Ireland work closely with colleagues in Silicon Valley by embracing a microservices model. The model calls for small, autonomous teams to develop, build, deploy and monitor their own code, while constantly communicating with US teams without being constrained by dependencies.
The Belfast team's success has also contributed to an unprecedented run of product releases dating back to early 2019 with the launch of Chargeback Recovery, which expands Signifyd’s Commerce Protection Platform beyond fraud chargebacks to significantly automate the management and recovery of non-fraud chargebacks.
Next came INR Protection, which refers to “item not received” and extends Signifyd’s guarantee to claims from a customer that an order was never delivered. Then, this summer, Signifyd launched Seamless SCA, a solution that allows European merchants to comply with the stricter customer authentication requirements contained in the PSD2 regulations that took effect in September.
Seamless SCA was the first strong customer authentication (SCA) solution certified by EMVCo for the 3DS2.2 protocol. The solution provides a combination of technology and infrastructure that allows authorisation to be completed efficiently depending on the order's circumstances, and shifts fraud liability away from merchants.
Signifyd’s Head of Human Resources, Emily Mikailli commented: “There is now no Signifyd without Belfast and everything we’ve done over the last year and everything we do moving forward will reflect the intellectual heft and innovative spirit we have in Belfast.”
