My colleagues and I in the Retail Payments Risk Forum participate as speakers or attendees in what sometimes seems to be a nonstop stream of banking and payments conferences that run from mid-September to mid-November. This effort is part of our mission to support the education of the stakeholders in the payments ecosystem with a focus on payments risk. We also use the opportunity to network with other attendees and vendors to stay on top of the latest developments and market solutions that are being deployed to combat payments fraud. These events also give us a chance to provide our perspective on trends and key issues involving payment risk.

At a recent fraud conference, I was on a panel discussing fraud trends and key threat vectors. The moderator of the panel revealed some results from Information Security Media Group's 2014 Faces of Fraud survey of financial institutions (FIs). There was a specific question about whether FIs had seen a change in the level of losses from account takeover fraud since the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council issued its supplemental guidance on Internet banking authentication in 2011. That guidance directed financial institutions to evaluate "new and evolving threats to online accounts and adjust their customer authentication, layered security, and other controls as appropriate in response to identified risks." The survey results are shown in the chart below.

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Source: 2014 Faces of Fraud Survey, Information Security Media Group

While the moderator and some of the other panelists seemed to focus on the 20 percent who said they had seen an increase in fraud, I had the perspective of the glass being half full by the 55 percent who indicated that the fraud had stayed about the same or decreased. Given the certainty that the number and magnitude of data breaches have increased and that the number of attempts by criminals to commit some sort of payment fraud through account takeovers was significantly up, I opined that since the fraud levels for the majority of the FIs had stayed at the same level or declined should be considered as a victory.

Certainly, I am not saying the tide has turned and the criminals are on their way to retirement, but I think the payments industry stakeholders should take some pride that its efforts to combat payment fraud are making some progress through the continuing development and deployment of anti-fraud tools. Am I being too Pollyannaish?

Photo of David Lott By David Lott, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed