The Mobile Payments and Fraud Survey 2017

The Mobile Payments and Fraud Survey: 2017 Report is the fifth edition of this annual study which seeks to understand and measure the state of mobile payments and mobile channel fraud.

Now with five years of data and thousands of merchants surveyed, this study is able to identify persistent patterns and changing trends around many aspects of mobile channel payments and risk.

In this year’s study, merchants who actively support the mobile channel increased from 54 to nearly 80% of those surveyed. Merchants who stated that the mobile channel was not important to their company’s revenue fell from nearly one-in-five merchants to just 7%.

Over this same time frame, the portion of merchants who earned less than 5% of their total revenue in the mobile channel fell from one-half to one-fifth of all merchants. To say the mobile channel and the emphasis merchants place on mobile has grown over the past five years would be an understatement.

While the industry has enjoyed healthy revenue growth in the mobile channel, fraud has continued to migrate to the mobile channel as well. The share of merchants who could definitively state that fraud in the mobile channel is increasing reached 40%, up from just 23% last year. Although 42% of merchants aren’t sure whether mobile fraud grew or shrank relative to their mobile volume, less than 8% said that fraud in the mobile channel declined as a percentage of total volume.

The majority of merchants, 60%, believe browser-based mobile payments are those at greatest risk for fraud. Causing some concern is the fact that despite more merchants reporting growing mobile fraud, fewer merchants are concerned with managing fraud risk in the mobile channel any differently than they do for traditional e-commerce.

Only about one-in-four merchants say the mobile channel is higher risk than e-commerce today, whereas 44% of merchants felt this way two years ago. And compared to two years ago, the number of merchants who indicated the mobile channel requires additional tools to manage risk has stayed flat. There are several areas where merchants are making major efforts and improvements to better support mobile payments.

In the first Mobile Payments and Fraud Survey, over 55% of merchants stated they were not able to detect whether a transaction was coming from a mobile device. Today, less than 15% of merchants are not able to detect whether a transaction is originating on a mobile device.

For the third consecutive year, merchants have been more likely to support the two major mobile operating systems as well as cross-platform solutions like mobile optimized websites. Merchants have also grown by leaps and bounds in terms of the various features they support to facilitate mobile payments.

The most common feature merchants support today are dedicated mobile websites, which 47%of merchants offer today, up from 38% five years ago. Mobile apps that can be used for online shopping are supported by 44% of merchants today, up from just 21%at the time of the inaugural survey.

Although mobile wallets used at the physical point-of-sale haven’t caught up to support for mobile e-commerce, nearly 30% of merchants accept POS mobile payments today, nearly twice as many merchants as supported this five years ago.

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