Despite the efforts made by Financial Institutions, they are currently losing the battle against financial fraud. Credit card fraud continues to grow faster than credit card spending. Data breaches have resulted in more card details being compromised, and the growth in online shopping has led to more opportunities for eCommerce fraud.
Credit Card Fraud
According to a 2016 report by Nilson, losses from credit card fraud amounted to $21.8 billion in 2015. That’s an increase of 162% from the 2010 figure which was $8 billion. The losses for 2016 are already estimated at over $24 billion, and these losses are expected to reach $31 billion by 2020.
The total value of credit and debit card transactions was $31 trillion in 2015. So, nearly 0.6 percent of the value of all transactions was lost to fraud. While the total value of credit card transactions is growing at close to 7 percent a year, credit card fraud is growing at over 16 percent every year.
According to the same report, gross fraud losses accounted for 6.9 cents per $100 spent. That was up from 5.7 cents per $100 in 2014. Credit card issuers bare 72% of these losses, while merchants and ATM operators share the other 28% of the losses from card fraud.
Data breaches are also growing at a rapid pace, compromising more cards every year. And while eCommerce continues to take market share from in store purchases, the opportunities for fraud continue to grow across the board.
Other Transaction Fraud
While credit card fraud accounts for the lion’s share of bank fraud, identity theft and eCommerce fraud are also on the rise.
Identity theft allows criminals to empty savings accounts and commit other forms of fraud. While merchants and card issuers usually bear the losses from credit card fraud, account holders more often than not bear the losses incurred through identity fraud.
Experian reported that eCommerce fraud rose 33% in 2016. eCommerce fraud takes many forms, usually involving stolen credit card details or identity theft, as well as charge back schemes (Also known as friendly fraud), which are also on the rise.
Combating Fraud
To combat fraud at a global scale we need a decentralized system with constant availability to provide live risk scores for transactions. Storing the anonymous transaction data securely on a decentralized data network and building a shared layer to access this network on a block chain will create an entirely new set of possibilities for AI capabilities and insights.
The benefits of decentralized/shared control, particularly as a foundation for AI, results in more data, thus improved modelling capabilities and qualitatively new data leading to entirely new models.
Such an open network will yield many interesting by-products such as:
Credit scores to provide financial inclusion for Credit invisibles.
Transaction scores for fast and accurate recognition of transaction fraud.
Shared Global Intelligence which will make the risk models portable, especially online transaction patterns. Such data will becoming a playground for data scientists, encouraging them to mine the up to date data and even come up with revolutionary risk models to safeguard the global community from fraud.
Stay tuned for more announcements regarding our revolutionary project..