Four tips to help you design a risk strategy to combat fraud in 2023

The threat of online fraud has never been greater than in recent times due to new and more sophisticated actors as well as the continued growth of e-commerce.

Fraud can take millions off the profit table, erode trust, and damage brands

2023 will be a tipping point for payments fraud, as recessionary pressures continue to impact consumer spending and bottom-line revenue. Mitigating fraud and building trust with customers will be top of the agenda for businesses that want to thrive in 2023.

We’ve learned over time that fraud is more prevalent when the economy is slower. According to Statista, online fraud increased year-on-year by 285% in 2021 as the fallout of the pandemic continued, and businesses globally lost $20 billion over that period. In addition, the e-commerce, money transfer, and banking sectors are particularly vulnerable, as they are expected to cumulatively lose an estimated $200 billion to online payment fraud between 2020 and 2024. 2023 can be the year to turn this around.

At a time of economic imbalance and with the cost of living increasing, protecting revenue and retaining customers is mission-critical to the survivability of all companies. One way businesses can defend themselves against bad actors and in turn help protect and build trust with customers in 2023 is to underpin themselves with a fraud prevention strategy that is effective.

Online businesses may not necessarily be thinking about fraudsters, but fraudsters are thinking about them and coming up with innovative ways to penetrate anti-fraud solutions. In speaking with people in fintech and customers across many sectors we often hear that some of the most important conversations happening about revenue directly link to fraud. We also hear that due to a lack of sophistication, many fraud products do not allow for customisation and end up blocking far too many legitimate transactions.

Four ways businesses can protect themselves from online fraud

While much of this will require a nuanced approach, there are four things companies may find relatively easy to implement when combatting fraud to ensure their business can thrive in 2023.

1. Analyse and identify weaknesses in your fraud variables 

Prioritising security is only part of the picture. You must experiment more often with the performance of your risk tools and continue to segment how you process transactions around products and customer groups.

Four steps to getting there are as follows. The first is ensuring the payments data is accessible. Understanding and storing this information accurately, alongside any user information you are permitted to access, will help form a basis for any future analysis. Without this foundation, businesses are limiting how effectively they can respond to fraud.

Secondly, companies need to analyse the data. It’s important to monitor the health of your risk strategy and identify areas for improvement with detailed and highly visual analytics. For some companies, this will mean building dashboards that provide high level views of trends and design alerts to notify administrators of high volumes of suspicious fraud.

Next it will be important to launch an investigation. Diagnosing the root causes of false positives and false negatives to understand what changes need to be made is an essential part of continuously improving performance. Then finally, companies should always safely introduce new rules and settings with shadow mode testing. All experiments should be run silently to understand the potential impact without affecting live traffic.

2. Fully customise your fraud protection

No two businesses are the same. Companies should ensure fraud solutions are fully customisable for their business structures and processes, taking into consideration whether they accept cross-border payments across different currencies – which act as closed-loop systems – or the level of configuration you need to allow you to trigger and score certain actions including accepting, declining, or making a 3DS decision based on your review.

Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to risk is less intuitive than what the changing and unpredictable nature of fraud detection and prevention requires. There’s also the possibility that you could end up rejecting an increasing number of genuine payments, lowering your ability to maximise revenue. Having low false-rejection rates while being able to reject fraudulent transactions (and only these transactions) is key to sustainable business growth.

3. Deploy a solution that utilises machine learning

Machine learning (ML) will help you keep up to date with the latest evolutions in fraud. For example, if a business has previously experienced a new type of fraud, ML can learn from this and store the payment attributes as potentially abnormal. However, ML needs to be trained so it knows what features need to be designed in order for it to be successful.

For example, when scanning transactions for your business, machine learning can identify the same attributes as a previous attack and automatically score similar payment transactions as ‘highly likely’ to be fraudulent and decline them. Suggesting risk rules based on trained algorithms will aid your business as it looks to improve its security while simplifying business operations.

4. Use a multi-layered approach with authentication, but remember to stay lean

Applying additional authentication to risky transactions with an integrated 3DS2 solution could be something to bear in mind. It would be wise to consider a different approach for a low-value purchase from an existing customer versus a high-value purchase made by a new customer. These two instances carry different levels of risk and should be reflected as such when designing your strategy.

Changes in payment security have meant that entering passcodes or verifying a purchase via email can sometimes be too clunky, and specifically for e-commerce businesses, could lead to abandoned carts by shoppers. Attracting and retaining high-value customers has to sit alongside efforts to protect them. The pendulum cannot swing too far one way or the other.

Now is the time to make fraud a key focus for you and your business

Fraud can take millions off the profit table, erode trust, and damage brands to the point of no return – all stemming from the efforts of nameless, faceless third-party fraudsters. Using machine learning tools to help improve accuracy allows you and your business to review performance and conduct investigations that allow for more genuine payments to be accepted. 2023 will likely be the year where businesses that can protect their revenue and build strong customer relationships will thrive in the coming decades. If done well, your fraud risk strategy could be the strategic driver to unlocking the revenue you’ve been overlooking.