Five key takeaways from the Merchant Risk Council London 2017

The Merchant Risk Council is a global trade association that brings together industry professionals in fraud, risk and payments. The conference saw speakers from the likes of from PayU, JPMorgan Chase, Google and Santander who all took part in educational sessions and spoke about where the industry is heading. These are our five key takeaways from the event.

Not just mobile-first, but mobile-only

As consumers, we can now can connect to any e-commerce site quicker than ever before, and the options at our fingertips are endless. A report by CyberSource presented at the conference states that 78% of European millennials who use smartphones have a ‘mobile first approach’ when it comes to technology.

However, the most unambiguous trend in e-commerce is the growth of the mobile channel. With a growing number of consumers linked to their mobile phones, it’s important that merchants and businesses have the infrastructure in place of their business model ready to gear towards excelling on mobile platforms. An increasing number of customers depend on digital serves to meet their everyday needs and it’s becoming increasingly important to optimize mobile platforms to provide the best service for the consumer.

Global regulation must comply

Cross border commerce is growing by 26% annually, and is expected to reach $678 billion by 2018, according to research by CyberSource. Fraud is now technologically sophisticated and is becoming increasingly hard to detect.

Data protection should comply despite your location. Data breaching, scams, malware seem to be everyday occurrences these days. These scams and data compromises have increased the risk for account takeover fraud, and has more than doubled recently as the losses can drastically exceed other types of fraud.

Cross-border collaboration between issuers and merchants

As online merchants expand their international presence, managing payments acceptance can become increasingly complex. Working with a single provider can lead to expensive and inefficient transactions. Alternatively, working with multiple providers to accept payment demands to constant maintenance seems like the way to go.

With the digital economy changing how consumers shop and interact with businesses, consumers now expect a fast and seamless transaction period that is highly secure. Payments and fraud management are no longer back-office utilities but rather a critical source to achieve competitiveness across brands and improve the customer experience.

Reducing checkout friction and false declines

In a talk between Google’s senior product manager Mark Walick, and Santander’s fraud strategy manager Joe Walters, moderated by Julie Fergerson, Ethoca’s SVP of Industry Solutions, the panellists explored the concept of false declines and why this growing trend can be more detrimental than fraud. False declines are a result of overly regulated and restricted fraud rules that decline transactions carried out by consumers, even if there is a non-fraudulent case. New research by Ethoca reveals that after conducting a pilot with merchants and issuers, 52% of the orders the merchants thought were fraud turned out to be good orders that they could have successfully fulfilled. The report also states that it’s costing both parties 1.9 billion transactions and $145bn in sales a year.

Problems lead to innovation

Numerous industry experts pointed out that without any of the pain points in fraud detection, there wouldn’t be a greater drive behind innovating to provide a better market. Businesses may not be aware of any faults in their systems and can’t fully assess whether their model and infrastructure can handle fraud and risk.

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