Rochelle Blease, President of G2 Risk Solutions, discusses the biggest risks facing online marketplaces—from fraud and compliance challenges to AI-driven threats—and shares expert strategies for securing digital commerce in 2025 and beyond.
Welcome Rochelle, we’d like for you to share how your background shapes your role at G2 Risk Solutions.
With almost 40 years in risk and compliance in financial services and legal markets, I’ve gained unique experience leading and growing businesses in dynamic, global markets. I’ve tried to be a positive change agent and improve businesses that deliver critical risk and compliance solutions. With G2 Risk Solutions (G2RS), my deep-rooted knowledge and experience will help drive change and improvements that create a safer financial services and digital commerce ecosystem.
What are the biggest emerging risks you see for online marketplaces, particularly in the realms of fraud and data integrity?
As e-commerce and the digital payments ecosystem flourish, the online marketplace landscape is evolving rapidly. As expected, this comes with various emerging risks, including sophisticated fraud schemes, AI-driven threats, and global regulatory complexity.
Additionally, operational risks from fraud, bad seller behavior, or compliance failures threaten the marketplace’s reputation, which underpins its business model. A damaged reputation can result in losing vendors, customers, and partners, leading to a negative financial impact.
To navigate these risks, online marketplaces must proactively blend advanced technology, human intelligence, vigilance, and strategic partnerships. By addressing these challenges head-on, online marketplaces can protect operations, sustain growth, and secure their place as trusted leaders in the digital economy.
With the accelerated shift to digital commerce, how have fraud patterns evolved, and what new fraud tactics are gaining traction?
One major shift, in particular, is the “industrialization” of fraud enablement. For example, transaction laundering is a method of disguising illicit transactions by processing them through a seemingly legitimate merchant account. This has evolved from a fraud tactic used by individual bad merchants to a widespread issue enabled by the rise of transaction laundering rings. These rings have scaled the problem by creating large networks of merchant accounts marketed to engage in transaction laundering. These operations work fast to apply for e-commerce merchant accounts and begin processing violative transactions as soon as the account is granted. To combat this, payment service providers must step up their game regarding fraudulent transaction detection and resolution.
From a risk management perspective, what critical vulnerabilities do online platforms often overlook in their infrastructure or processes?
An area of vulnerability is in the onboarding of new merchants. Marketplaces want a fast and easy experience to drive revenue. However, bad merchants attempt to infiltrate and exploit processes designed for speed, not risk management. For this reason, thorough onboarding due diligence is extremely important. It can help prevent fraud before it begins.
To meet the demand from merchants for fast onboarding while simultaneously conducting comprehensive risk assessments, online marketplaces can employ AI-powered risk analysis tools. If done during the onboarding phase, massive amounts of data can be leveraged beyond traditional underwriting. Based on risk scores, online marketplaces can reject applications from merchants that fall outside of their risk tolerance. Decisions can be made quickly and confidently using responsible AI, which includes highly trusted data sources.
Even if a bad merchant obtains an account for a very short time, they can still immediately start processing illicit transactions. Every transaction—even just one—can result in significant fines for the online marketplace.
How can online marketplaces balance the imperative for growth with rigorous risk and compliance frameworks?
This balance is becoming trickier to navigate, particularly as compliance and regulation of online marketplaces grow more stringent. Newer regulations in both the US and Europe are shifting more responsibility onto online marketplaces for the actions of their sellers with potentially severe financial penalties.
That said, online marketplaces can pursue growth safely. Unlocking this ability requires a marriage of technology and human intelligence. This collaborative effort can capture a comprehensive risk picture from the outset of merchant relationships. It also enables ongoing illegal and violative activity monitoring while applying judgment and aligning risk tolerances with business strategy.
How are regulatory bodies influencing compliance standards for online marketplaces, and what trends are you seeing in regulatory requirements?
The regulatory environment is placing more and more scrutiny on online marketplaces at a global level. Since it’s challenging to hold bad merchants accountable due to digital commerce and cross-border transactions, regulators are holding online marketplaces more accountable for the actions of those selling on their platforms. This can be seen with the passage of the EU Digital Services Act and the US Inform Consumers Act. These regulations place greater obligations on digital marketplaces, such as requiring sellers to proactively remove illegal content and identify the sellers of counterfeit goods.
Their resources are further stretched thin by putting the onus on online marketplaces to self-monitor merchants. This puts them at greater risk for compliance violations, fees, and penalties.
In a digital ecosystem, what mechanisms can marketplaces use to enforce accountability and detect non-compliant merchants in real-time?
Ultimately, the best solutions responsibly marry artificial and human intelligence. While AI can ingest vast amounts of information and provide real-time risk intelligence, it can’t get everything right. Many examples of nuanced situations require human analysts to investigate further and determine the nature of a merchant’s activity. So, online marketplaces should make the best use of advanced technology that can handle the scale of operations and human experts that can analyze complex situations.
What advanced risk management strategies should platforms implement to proactively guard against security breaches?
The best way to avoid security breaches is to have a comprehensive end-to-end onboarding and monitoring system throughout the merchant lifecycle. There will always be fraudulent activity, but to help reduce it beforehand, a vigorous merchant lifecycle management process catches bad actors at the onset while keeping an eye out for future suspicious activity.
How is technology—such as AI, machine learning, or advanced analytics—shaping the risk management landscape in eCommerce?
It’s opening the door for e-commerce providers to get deeper, more comprehensive risk intelligence. At G2RS, we’ve transformed our 20+ years of industry experience into a vast dataset that produces rich insights. What’s incredible about this is that our universe of information expands and gets better by the day. This enables e-commerce providers to be much more proactive in managing risk.
Each business will have a unique risk tolerance, business strategy, and plan for growth. With access to such a large data pool, online marketplaces are empowered to develop tailored risk management strategies. They can set risk parameters that reflect their unique factors to help better achieve their goals.
As we look to the future, what do you anticipate will be the major risk management and compliance challenges for digital marketplaces in the next few years?
Advancing technology is a two-sided coin: digital marketplaces can leverage it to scale while managing risk and operations more effectively and efficiently. At the same time, bad actors will use it for their own gain. This will require constant vigilance from digital marketplaces and their technology partners to quickly understand how illicit behavior is evolving and can be mitigated.
Trends we’re watching now include generative AI to create convincing violative or fraudulent content, verification-based fraud schemes, and exploiting new payment technologies.
As governments intensify their focus on global digital commerce, marketplaces will face increasing compliance requirements to increase accountability, transparency, and consumer protections. For digital marketplaces operating on a global scale, it’s likely to become increasingly complex with varying regulations from across different countries and local jurisdictions. The ability to comply with different frameworks will be a challenge that grows more complicated as digital commerce becomes the norm and regulators work to catch up.
