- According to a 2016 report, the average yearly financial expense attributed to fraud for retailers was 7.6 percent of annual revenue across all channels, including online and offline sales. And that is on a business-as-usual day. On peak-retail days, clients operating on Amazon have reportedly seen an increase of 150 percent in fraud attempts.
- But the online retail anti-fraud business is about to change, and that change is going to affect consumers and retailers as well. This is due to new EU regulation called PSD2. PSD2, which comes into effect in mid-2019, is mainly about opening bank APIs to 3rd parties. But it also includes provisions applying to online sales.
- The intention of this directive is good at heart but unnecessarily provides friction to the more than 99 percent of users out there that are good, according to Lee: “We are essentially making buyers conform to a set of rules because the system is being exploited by a select few bad apples.
- White said this is going to have a tremendous impact on the market, specifically in the e-commerce space: “Conversion rates are already low in this space, and any added obstacles or friction could correlate into an increase in cart abandonments.
- This can be a difficult task because if it was simple we wouldn’t need the predictive power of machine learning in the first place.