Survey finds half of merchants use consumer authentication for ecommerce

CardinalCommerce has published its fourth annual “Consumer Authentication Survey”, which found that 41 percent of global merchants and 54 percent of global organizations use or support consumer authentication to protect themselves against fraud and false positives.

The survey, which is co-sponsored by The Fraud Practice, is intended to provide insights into market use and consumer authentication programs such as Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode.

The 2017 survey is based on the responses of hundreds of participants worldwide between October and November 2016, and includes data about merchants, fraud and eCommerce vendors, payment providers, card issuers, and card associations.

Worldwide use by merchants of consumer authentication programs continues to rise with nearly 25 percent year-over-year growth in the share of North American merchants who use these programs, from 29 percent in 2016 to 36 percent in 2017, the report said.

Meanwhile, only 39 percent of merchants operating in North America said they are using consumer authentication.

Comparatively, 57 percent of merchants in Africa, 50 percent in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East, 49 percent in the European Union, 48 percent in South America and 39 percent in the Asia Pacific region, said they are using consumer authentication, according to the survey.

Of those global merchants that use customer authentication, 88 percent are using multiple forms of authentication — such as fingerprint and voice biometrics — with nearly three forms of authentication on average.

In the previous three years of the survey, merchants said the main reason they were not using consumer authentication was that they were worried that protocols would negatively impact sales conversion.

However, in the 2017 survey, merchants not using consumer authentication said it was primarily because online volume or fraud attempts were too low to warrant its use, followed by concerns about consumer authentication negatively affecting the user experience.

The study also found that the number of merchants reporting a negative impact on user experience from consumer authentication dropped from 38 percent in 2014 to 25 percent in 2017.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  ecommerce  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  multi-factor authentication  |  secure transactions