MasterCard goes into battle against false declines

MasterCard is bidding to help banks cut down the number of false declines on card transactions with the roll out of more precise behavioural fraud analytics.

With one out of every six cardholders experiencing at least one decline because of suspected fraud in the past year, MasterCard says its new technology bundle will provide deeper insights into cardholder spending habits in a split-second.

Dubbed MasterCard IQ, the core products include an authorisation and assurance tool. Authorization IQ uses the unique and historical behavior of the card to predict and assess risk against a current transaction. The Assurance kit enables the exchange of information from the merchant about the particular circumstances of a transaction to help provide a more nuanced risk score.

Research by Javelin shows that the value of false declines per year has hit $118 billion, more than 13 times the total amount lost annually to actual card fraud ($9 billion). Not only are such refusals more likely to hit more affluent consumers who spend more on big ticket items, they also have a negative rebound in customer attitude towards the bank and merchant.

“While the industry has relentlessly worked to reduce fraud, some of these efforts have resulted in an increase in transactions being needlessly declined,” says Ajay Bhalla, president of Enterprise Security Solutions, MasterCard. “Nobody likes being falsely accused of something. Our IQ products leverage technology and insights to deliver merchants and consumers a convenient, uninterrupted checkout experience.”

Related Companies

Mastercard

Channels

Retail banking Security Payments

Keywords

Cards Mobile & online banking E-commerce

Comments: (5)

A Finextra member 19 February, 2016, 13:16

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As part of MasterCard's API capability for placing more control into the hands of the cardholder .... Mastercard should allow the cardholder to "block-off" vacation dates by geo-location....try to reduce false positives from fraud alerts while on vacation ... saves the phone call to CSR's etc etc

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A Finextra member 19 February, 2016, 15:44

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The cencept is working well for CommBank ....

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 19 February, 2016, 17:45

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"Research by Javelin shows that the value of false declines per year has hit $118 billion, more than 13 times the total amount lost annually to actual card fraud ($9 billion)."

“While the industry has relentlessly worked to reduce fraud, some of these efforts have resulted in an increase in transactions being needlessly declined,”.

I suspected something like this when I wrote Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills

But I didn't dream that the revenue loss would be 13X of fraud loss.

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A Finextra member 19 February, 2016, 22:35

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Katharaman ...that's a valid point ... "its the transactions that didn't take place" anything we can do to complete a valid transaction only serves to increase revenues and customer satisfaction ... Like I said vacation false positives are a real pain ... and yes they can be prevented with intelligent API's ...