Emcee Singapore: Charmaine hosted an Ayden podcast titled “Managing Payment Frauds”, together with experts from businesses in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region on how merchants can keep up to date with changing fraud trends and solutions needed to keep customers safe.

In this episode, Charmaine kicked off the discussion on the challenge faced by organisations in balancing their security measures with a positive client experience. 

Charmaine delved into one of the most pressing issues facing APAC businesses, fraud. Fraud hurts the bottom line, with 44% of businesses saying that fraudulent transactions and chargebacks are a significant cost. It can also break customer trust, damage brand reputation, and halt growth. Brands need to make it as seamless as possible for customers to shop with them. 

Aurélie Saada, APAC Risk Lead at Microsoft, explained that it is not an easy task. A major fraud is the contact cover, where basically they manage to have access to your ID and to your password. And they will go on your account, and they will just buy things on your behalf and using the credit card that you will have saved under your profile. Aurélie shared that they see fraud related to crypto mining on some of their products. And they also experience a simple range of attacks like HSN, or like network broadcast and illicit content. 

For Cat Parker, Global Director of Commercial at T2 Tea, the answer is to work with partners who offer the best protection and support. She added, “Whether it’s an ERP system, our POS systems, middleware that we have sitting in between, but also ecomm platforms, and customer experiences, sort of that web architecture space, we tend to partner with best in class technologies for that reason, but you’ve still got points where you have to integrate with everything.”

Moving on to support, Charmaine introduced Adyen’s Martyna Lazar, Head of Risk and Compliance for APAC, to explain how Adyen helps clients adapt to the changing fraud landscape. Martyna elaborated, “Fraudsters would usually use the card testing to determine the validity of the card numbers. So first, they would purchase the card details or the packages of many, many cards on the dark web, or they would just steal the card details via saved account takeover attacks or via phishing or spyware software. And then with those numbers in hand, they will attempt small purchases on completely unsuspecting merchants of low value transactions, just to see if the card was approved. And then you know, those small transactions were approved. And by small transactions, I’m thinking ride hailing transactions of couple of dollars, food delivery transactions of couple of dollars. The fraudster see that, hey, those cards are actually working, they move on to the businesses with much higher ATV, so much higher average transaction value, right, your luxury retailers, for example.”

MRC CEO, Julie Ferguson, shared some of the major concerns of the organization’s members. She said, “There is so much more regulatory scrutiny in our industry. In the last five years, a lot of it has to do with the fact that the volume increased over the last couple of years because of the pandemic. But there has been a big increase not just on the bank side, but on the merchant side for how transactions happen.” 

Charmaine concluded the podcast stating, “Fraud is here to stay and it’s only going to get more sophisticated. While businesses will not be able to completely eliminate instances of fraud, by using data, staying informed, and working with reliable partners, they can improve the security of their checkout and ensure that the customer experience does not suffer.” 

Listen to the latest episode of our podcast, Behind the Figures, today: https://lnkd.in/gWJgfxgP