The recent news from Financial Fraud Action UK that the incidents of card fraud has fallen may be misleading, according to Pat Carroll, CEO of ValidSoft.
ValidSoft is a provider of telecommunications-based authentication and transaction verification products and services for financial and government organisations.
According to Carroll, while today’s figures show a reduction in card fraud, what appear to be encouraging statistics disguise a less reassuring reality.
"In recent months banks have been taking 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," said Carroll.
"This is the credit card equivalent of bricking up your doors and windows to prevent burglary – very effective, but hardly a long term solution," he added. "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."
Carroll argued that 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.
