Case Study: Ayda
Building Trust in B2B Research Through Secure Participant Payments
The Challenge
B2B International regularly engages senior decision-makers, technical specialists and hard-to-reach professionals across global markets. For specialist B2B research, the value of the insight is only as strong as the quality of the people providing it. Ensuring that participants are genuine, validated individuals is critical, particularly when research findings influence high-value business decisions.
Historically, incentive payments have been viewed as an administrative necessity rather than a source of data quality assurance. Traditional voucher-based reward systems create operational complexity and provide limited validation of participant identity. In practice that means patchy reward coverage in exactly the hard-to-reach markets specialist B2B research depends on, and in some cases the burden of chasing participants to collect and store participant bank details. As concerns around professional respondents, duplicate identities and fraudulent participation continue to grow across the industry, B2B International wanted a solution that reduced operational complexity and improved participant experience all while strengthening confidence in respondent authenticity.
The industry data sets a demanding baseline. Findings presented by GRBN and MRS at their data quality webinar in September 2026 show that 43% of B2B research buyers now discard 30% or more of their data. B2B International set out to run against that trend rather than treat it as the cost of doing B2B research.1
The Solution
B2B International partnered with Ayda to transform participant incentive management from an administrative necessity into a validation and trust-building mechanism.
Unlike traditional rewards platforms that focus primarily on vouchers, Ayda allows participants to choose how they receive incentives, including direct-to-bank payments. This creates a more convenient participant experience while adding an additional layer of verification.
The partnership also aligns with Ayda’s wider mission of improving trust in research. Through AydaTrust, the platform combines established fraud detection techniques such as VPN and residential proxy detection, duplicate account monitoring, IP analysis and device fingerprinting with payment verification processes. Using multiple sources for detection and including bank account verification makes it significantly hard for fraudsters to bypass.
What separates payment-based verification from software-only detection is where the check happens. When a participant is paid direct to their bank account, that transfer is processed through a regulated financial institution which has already carried out its own identity and anti-money-laundering checks on the account holder. If the account does not correspond to the identity the participant has claimed, the payment fails, an outcome that is visible, logged, and difficult to engineer around. Device and IP signals catch a great deal, and a determined fraudster who works around them still must clear a materially higher barrier: obtaining a verified bank account in a fabricated identity. After all, the objective of incentive fraud is ultimately to reach the reward. If the payment cannot be successfully delivered, there is little value in getting through the rest of the process.
Learn more about Ayda here: https://helloayda.com/
The Results
Analysis conducted across Ayda’s client base demonstrates a clear participant preference for flexible, cash-like reward options.
Across all participants paid through the platform:
- 91.4% prefer cash payments direct to their account.
- Only 8.6% choose vouchers2
The pattern holds across audiences: 96% of B2B participants chose cash-like methods, against 95.2% of B2C.
The bigger picture is not simply how much data is removed at the final stage, but how effectively fraud is deterred and filtered out across the full process. B2B International uses multiple automated checks to identify and remove a higher proportion of suspicious or poor-quality responses before manual review begins. Of the responses that remain, a further 15% are removed through manual quality checks. Payment verification adds another important barrier: if fraudulent participants cannot successfully receive an incentive, the financial motivation to keep attempting to enter studies is significantly reduced. Together, these layers help prevent poor-quality data from reaching clients rather than relying on a single headline removal rate.
For B2B International, these results reinforce a key principle: respondents prefer flexibility and convenience.
The platform also delivers exceptionally high engagement with incentives. Ayda reported that 98.65% of incentives are successfully claimed, leaving only 1.35% unclaimed. This helps ensure that participants receive the rewards they have earned while reducing administrative follow-up and wastage.
Shifra, Founder & CEO at Ayda, said: “The industry has spent a decade treating fraud as a detection problem and incentives as an administrative one. They are the same problem. Device signals, IP analysis, duplicate detection, we run all of it, and it works. What payment adds is a regulated institution that has already checked the person behind the account. That is why we believe payment belongs inside the trust stack, not adjacent to it.”
The Impact
For B2B International, the partnership with Ayda has become about much more than payments.
Direct-to-bank payments, combined with fraud prevention and payment-level verification, give respondents an experience that reflects modern expectations while giving researchers greater confidence that those respondents are genuine.
Pete Mullarkey, Insights Network Manager at B2B International, said: “Not so long ago, participants would phone us to ask where their incentive was or why we couldn’t pay them sooner. Worse still were the occasions when someone slipped through the net, or claimed not to have received a payment they had already spent. Resolving these issues took time, often requiring follow-up or escalation. I certainly don’t miss those days. With Ayda, the payment process is automated, transparent and easy to track, giving us the clarity to check every detail quickly and confidently.”
As the market research industry continues to tackle increasing levels of fraud and participant misrepresentation, trust is becoming a competitive advantage, and one B2B International already holds. While the benchmark figures describe an industry discarding an ever-larger share of the responses it pays for, B2B International has moved the opposite way, validating participants before poor-quality data ever reaches a client.
The result is a partnership that delivers value for researchers, participants and clients alike: reducing friction, improving confidence and helping ensure that the insights generated come from real people with real expertise.
Letycia Bialle, Director of Product Operations & Customer Success at Ayda, and Peter Mullarkey, Insights Network Manager at B2B International.
1Source: GRBN Data Quality Benchmark (Wave 2), presented with MRS at the GRBN and MRS data quality webinar, September 2026. Based on 46 companies, 13 countries and approximately 2 million records.
2Source: analysis of incentive payments issued through Ayda, 2025/2026.