SEON to establish regional channel ecosystem to support APAC growth

As demand for digital fraud prevention solutions increases in the region, SEON is hoping to establish a channel ecosystem to serve customers better in APAC.

SEON continues to witness rapid growth in the Asia Pacific region, especially in providing real-time fraud and AML solutions. The US-based digital fraud prevention and compliance vendor recently announced plans to expand its presence in the region, with a team of technical, sales and support specialists to be based in Singapore and Jakarta.

With the ability to provide clients with local expertise and faster response times, SEON is now hoping to set up a channel ecosystem in Asia Pacific to cater to markets where it is hoping to have a stronger presence in the future.

According to Matt DeLauro, President at SEON, the Asian region just in general has the most mobile-first population of anywhere in the world. Given this mobile-first population, there is a strong demand for customer experience.

“There's a lot of first-class technology companies building amazing apps that have great customer experiences. People don't want to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to put order somewhere. However, there are legacy tools that are out there that just haven't been able to provide the level of assurance that companies need,” said DeLauro.

When SEON moved into the region last year, it already had 50 customers in APAC. DeLauro highlighted that they were initially struggling opportunistically to try and service them. And this was why SEON decided that they wanted to be very deliberate about their strategy.

“We wanted to hire a senior P&L owner as a local leader. We knew we needed to be domiciled from a legal entity perspective in Singapore and that we had to get AWS regions stood up there. So, all of these things have been coming together over the last four or five months that allowed us to enter the region in a deliberate way. Now, we've got folks in Jakarta and Singapore, and our legal entity will be coming soon in Singapore,” added DeLauro.

Interestingly, DeLauro also pointed out that SEON has been initially dealing directly with customers in the region. This was because the demand has been coming from customers directly to visit SEON’s website and asking them to do business with them.

“We would like to have, on a market-by-market basis, a partner-first motion in place where we see our presence in the region is Singapore, the financial hub of the region, having responsible executive leadership, marketing capabilities that are able to support partners, onboarding and implementation teams, support teams, all the things that either a value-added reseller or a channel partner would need to be successful,” said DeLauro.

Put simply, SEON wants to build that capability here in Singapore and identify the right partners to take them into those markets as it’s the same model they’re using in Latin America and in a lot of markets in Europe.

A unified fraud prevention tool

Despite businesses in APAC increasing their fraud prevention budget, findings from SEON’s 2025 Digital Fraud Outlook revealed that 86% of organizations are still relying on fragmented tools and reactive systems. This not only allows threats to slip through the cracks but also burdens fraud teams with manual reviews and alert fatigue - slowing innovation and eroding customer trust.

For DeLauro, with APAC being a very strong mobile first community and with customer experience imperative for businesses, having an AI-driven unified platform that is capable of replacing legacy fraud and AML tools is a game changer for organizations.

“SEON’s view of the rest of the world is that most companies are overly niche with respect to fraud. They focus on a specific type of signals intelligence. There's lots of companies that can give you a great fingerprint device. There's lots of companies that can measure behavioral biometrics. There's also lots of companies that can give you data enrichment on a phone number or an email. But that doesn't solve a business problem, right?” said Delauro.

DeLauro also pointed out that most customers would end up with a “bird’s nest” of fraud tools after a few years as they would have five or six different solutions. They would then need to put all this into a data management tool and then they would have to build a decision-making engine

“The real key differentiator of SEON is that we have the broadest set of data signals that are available. They all go into a single API. They run through a scoring engine, and they provide an output which solves a business problem. And you can get that stand up and running in two to three days. It's a simple, restful API. Whereas, historically, you would incur a lot of technical debt, and you'd have to negotiate contracts with four or five different vendors and that kind of thing,” explained DeLauro.

As most traditional financial institutions are often trapped in the channel ecosystem of their banking as a service platform, the fintechs are not pinned down by any of these. This, in turn, enables the opportunity for SEON to offer their services.

Apart from working with financial services and fintechs. DeLauro also stated that SEON works with customers in the igaming and retail industries.

“Retail is a big focus for us. There's a lot of first-party fraud challenges in retail that the legacy solutions just aren't providing answers for right now. So, we definitely see that as a sort of growth. Also, increasingly, trust and safety teams are looking at our capabilities. It's not sort of like a direct financial fraud impact, but companies are using our services because they're trying to maintain the integrity of their platform even though there isn't like a direct financial loss,” added DeLauro.

Establishing a partner ecosystem in APAC

As SEON looks to set up a partner ecosystem in the region, DeLauro mentioned that the best partnerships are sort of complementary, which is they're good at the things that SEON is not good at and SEON is good at the things that maybe the partners are not good at.

“The challenge that we have is understanding the local market. So, we're looking for partners that weren't born yesterday. We want established players that have a track record of operating in financial services and understanding the language of banking and lending and fraud and risk.

We want partners that have access to those buyers and have a network. And from our perspective, we want to give them like a piece of technology that would allow them to affect a very large wave of technology refresh cycles in their market, something that we feel like is really game-changing compared to what their current customers probably are using today,” explained DeLauro.

With close to a 100% year-over-year growth, DeLauro believes that building out a top-tier channel structure or like a partner-first motion in certain markets as well as expanding their regional capabilities out of Singapore and Jakarta as a hub will be the focus for the rest of the year.

“Ideally, we can maintain a small footprint of some really amazing team members in Singapore and Jakarta and then rely on channel partners to deliver locally,” concluded DeLauro.