Verizon Media’s India team helps keep Yahoo relevant – Latest News

For those born in the early 90s, the thought of logging on to Yahoo to access mail will immediately induce nostalgia. Google’s Gmail is now the dominant email service. But people still use Yahoo Mail with a passion, says Rathi Murthy, chief technology officer at Verizon Media, the company that took over Yahoo’s assets in 2017. “People who used Yahoo Mail in the past have not got out of it. And it’s continuing to grow. Our app did better than the Google app in the app store recently. It’s the 1TB free storage that keeps me as a user,” she says.

Murthy grew up in Bengaluru, did electrical engineering at Bangalore University, and then did an MS in computer engineering at Santa Clara University, California. She went on to work at Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, eBay, American Express, GAP, and joined Verizon early this year.

Verizon Media’s Bengaluru engineers have been instrumental in keeping Yahoo’s mail service relevant. Murthy says the membership platform team in Bengaluru recently developed an option that allows Yahoo Mail users to recover their email account easily and more securely using their Facebook Messenger account. “The coding was done in India. The team here also conducted a study with users from the US, and collaborated closely with their US-based counterparts from product and design to fine-tune the option,” she says.

The Bengaluru team had to integrate with Facebook’s application programming interface (API) while also ensuring a proper security model was in place while dealing with token exchanges between Verizon Media and FB’s messenger API. API’s are software intermediaries that allow two applications to talk to each other, while token exchanges are part of the security protocol.

Another key contribution by the team here was the development of Carta – a fraud management tool that leverages machine learning. “Carta provides great features to keep our payment fraud rate and chargeback rates below market averages. Fraudsters use payment platforms to test out stolen cards. With card velocity rule engine and real-time transaction scoring built in Carta, we are able to keep fraudsters at bay,” says Murthy.

Most of Verizon Media and Yahoo’s payment transactions flow through Carta. Suspicious transactions are reviewed by fraud analysts. Murthy says Carta was able to significantly reduce the amount of manual work by identifying which transactions could be suspicious and which not.