Trends in consumer payment fraud: A call for consistent strong authentication across all consumer payments
Gerd Cimiotti, Toni Merschen · Journal of payments strategy & systems · 2014
Fraud has been a cost of doing business in the merchant and retail space since the beginning of organised trade thousands of years ago. Payment fraud is only a part of overall retail fraud, but it seems to have moved closer to the focus of the discussion in the financial industry and with the other stakeholders in the financial ecosystem, eg the merchants, the consumers and, last but not least, the regulators. This paper reviews the latest consumer payment fraud statistics and analyses the recent regulatory activities. The actions taken by the various stakeholders to detect or prevent fraud are then assessed in the context of both meeting regulatory provisions and enabling growth of retail volume seamlessly across all channels. It concludes with an urgent call for introducing a strong authentication regime across the consumer financial industry in a consistent and comprehensive way.