Fall in card fraud does not reflect reality

It was interesting to see the figures from Financial Fraud Action UK yesterday, which showed a reduction in card fraud. As is often the case, however, what appear to be encouraging statistics disguise a less reassuring reality.

In recent months, we’ve seen banks begin to take a far more aggressive approach to transaction declines and, in the case of cross-border transactions, on average nine out of ten declined transactions are in fact legitimate.

This is the credit card equivalent of bricking up your doors and windows to prevent burglary! It’s very effective, but hardly a long term solution.  This very blunt instrument approach to fraud reduction may reduce absolute fraud, but it also causes widespread consumer dissatisfaction and costs the banks highly in lost revenue and administration costs.

Rather than simply basing their decisions as to whether to accept or decline a transaction using historic data and behavioural patterns of customers, complementary technology exists which enables banks to anonymously make accurate assessments of the real time situation of their customers, so that not only is fraud reduced, but customer satisfaction is maintained at the same time.