What are your tips on sessions you recommend other Merchant Payment Professionals to join at MPE2021?
We recommend attending Session 2: Digital Identity, Biometrics & Tokenisation on Wednesday, 24th February 3:30 – 4:30 pm Central European Time. The session will elaborate on how to best protect the consumer identity from fraud on the digital channels. It will expand on authentication and authorization technologies availble to balance the security and simultaneously not obstruct the customer experience for digital interactions and transactions.
FRAUD & SECURITY:
What is the impact of a pandemic on merchant payment fraud & security management and will it permanently affect fraud levels?
Nearly a year into COVID-19, the shift to online commerce has been accelerated across a variety of industries. While growing transaction volumes, increasing online sales, and larger numbers of new online shoppers can be a benefit to merchants, they have also created a unique environment for new fraud and cyber attacks. With more online shoppers than ever before, this can pose an even greater risk: People less familiar with safeguarding their credentials and card details, and those unaware of proper password hygiene can create new targets for criminal behavior.
Fraud attack rates often rise in times of economic uncertainty, and when coupled with pre-pandemic trends, it’s estimated that online payment fraud could cost eCommerce merchants upwards of $25 billion annually by 20241. We – as an industry – should prepare ourselves for a new and higher baseline of fraud attack rates.
In our current environment, it’s more important than ever for all online businesses to understand the growing risk of online payment and account takeover fraud and the need to employ solutions to effectively intercept malicious behavior without disrupting these new online consumers. Even in the face of a pandemic, this can be done without negatively impacting your sales and allow you to still offer a seamless customer experience.
How will the frequency and severity of fraud attacks change in 2021?
As the number of account-centric attacks continue to rise, all signs suggest that online Account Takeover (ATO) fraud may reach an all-time high in 2021 – for reference, in a non-COVID environment in 2019, Account Takeover attacks cost eCommerce retailers $16,9 billion in losses.2
In addition, criminals are finding new ways to attack businesses “beyond the payment”. In other words, loyalty fraud, refunding fraud, promotional abuse are all becoming increasingly common for online merchants across a variety of industries. Each of these types of attacks are designed to take advantage of businesses that do not comprehensively monitor all account interactions.
Fraud Prevention teams are tasked with finding the right technologies to help them make more accurate decisions and detect ATOs. In the past, companies mainly focused on protecting checkout pages, but more recently have learned the importance of monitoring users from the moment they enter a site. Accertify’s new Digital Identity solution uses machine learning to help recognize patterns of valid interactions across all pages that users interact on. This allows us to recognize trusted users, while also identifying account takeover fraud and account origination attacks, such as automated bot attacks and human-driven hacks.
For more information on Account Protection, you can visit: https://www.accertify.com/products/digital-identity/.
How do you see new chargeback challenges caused by the pandemic?
As online trends continue in 2021, merchants are being forced to adopt new strategies for their eCommerce presence in light of unexpected volume increases. While this trend may help boost their bottom line if successful, it could also increase their likelihood of receiving a chargeback due to changing delivery processes, unexpected service interruptions, possible government mandates, and other factors. To effectively navigate these challenging times, merchants should have a holistic chargeback management solution in place.
- The first step is to try and prevent chargebacks in the first place. Merchants should communicate cancellation policies to ensure individuals are not taking advantage of relaxed policies in a way detrimental to the merchant. In addition, services, such as Ethoca Eliminator or Verifi Order Insight (VMPI) provide the issuer with an overview of policies governing the order and can deflect buyer’s remorse and friendly fraud chargebacks.
- The second step is for merchants to have a chargeback management strategy in place to help consolidate all of the order data, service\delivery data, and policies governing the transaction. This allows you to quickly handle friendly fraud and customer service chargebacks, as well as automate the representment process and use technology and not people where appropriate. The new world of workers being virtual creates challenges around PCI and access to PII data and so any way a merchant can automate and remove the need to access data helps in productivity and in reducing risk of data exposure for the business.
By implementing the above, merchants can be better positioned to adapt to the new norm and focus on increasing win rates, and remain flexible to handle unexpected business interruptions. For Accertify clients this means most merchants realize optimized efficiency and save money by trimming time spent dealing with chargebacks by up to 50%* compared to industry standards.
About Accertify: Accertify, Inc., an American Express company – is a leading provider of fraud prevention, chargeback management, digital identity, intelligent authentication (SCA) and payment gateway solutions to customers spanning eCommerce, financial services, airlines, travel, ticketing and entertainment industries worldwide.
Accertify’s layered risk platform, machine learning backbone, and rich reputational community database enable businesses to address challenges across the entire customer journey without impacting the customer experience. For more information, visit: www.Accertify.com .
1 Juniper Research whitepaper: Fighting Online Payment Fraud in 2020 2 https://threatpost.com/account-takeover-fraud-online-retailers/159802/
* Results based on Accertify clients during the period Jan – October, 2020.