Customers expect seamless commerce experiences and transactions to be secure. Yet, in today’s digital-first world, customers are under threat from bad actors looking to steal data and commit fraud.

Now, through F5 and Visa’s collaboration, merchants can provide their customers a seamless, secure, and personalized shopping experience. F5 Distributed Cloud Authentication Intelligence uses artificial intelligence and behavior analytics to securely recognize returning customers, eliminating their need to log in with a username and password. Customer recognition at the beginning of the customer journey now enables customer personalization and reduces the inefficiency of guest checkout.

Because Distributed Cloud Authentication Intelligence combines with F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, merchants can also now have access to fraud defenses and bot detection to protect the entire commerce journey, instead of historically where solutions have been limited to identifying bots only during checkout. This innovation recognizes bots even earlier in the process, providing a more secure experience.

“We are proud to partner with Visa to help merchants secure what matters most for their customers,” said Saurabh Bajaj, Vice President and General Manager, Bot & Risk Management at F5. “Customer trust is crucial to merchants’ businesses. When logged in users have a better, more seamless experience and they know their shopping journey is secure, they are less likely to abandon their carts—in fact, one merchant saw a 48 percent decrease in cart abandonment from using this solution. Now more than ever, it is critical that merchants remove login friction to provide this trusted experience and drive revenue to sustain economic resiliency.”

“Visa is pleased to partner with F5, a provider of best-in-class cybersecurity solutions,” said Jack Funda, SVP, Business Development & Partnerships, Global Merchant Sales & Acquiring at Visa. “Together, F5 and Visa will deliver innovative and secure solutions for Visa’s merchants to more effectively engage customers at the beginning of their online journey. Security is at the core of everything Visa, and this exciting step with F5 reinforces Visa’s commitment to securing the payments ecosystem and protecting all players within it.”

“Visa and F5 coming together solves important problems for merchants and consumers alike,” said Julie Conroy, Head of Risk Insights at Aite-Novarica Group, a leading global financial services research and advisory firm. “The end user gets the secure, frictionless shopping experience they demand, while merchants can see important metrics like bounce rate decreasing and annual top-line growth increasing. These benefits promise to expand as customer loyalty grows over time.”