Measuring Mobile Payments and Fraud – Kount’s 2018 Report

It’s that time of year again – Kount just released the sixth annual Mobile Payments and Fraud Report, highlighting the trends and changes taking place within the mobile channel. This annual survey, co-sponsored with Braintree and The Fraud Practice, had many interesting findings around the state of mobile wallets, top challenges for merchants, risk by channel, and more. Read on for the top takeaways before heading to our full report to get the lowdown on all things mobile payments and fraud. Mobile payments continue to evolve each year and a trend that isn’t going away are the different payment options supported by merchants: Support is up across the board for Near-Field Communication (up from 29% to 37%) and other mobile payments at the physical point-of-sale 26 percent of merchants plan to increase or add support for social commerce this year (purchases made directly through social media channels such as Instagram, Twitter, etc.) While merchants’ support for mobile wallets climbed from 22 to 29 percent overall, several major mobile wallets have lost traction: The percentage of respondents accepting Apple Pay in 2018 is down from 48 to 35 percent, the most drastic decline of all mobile wallets, and Google Pay is down from 38 to 25 percent.  With growth and constant change, challenges continue to be prevalent and the most common by mobile channel merchants today include: Maintaining ease of use for the consumer (60%) The ability to detect fraudulent order attempts (52%) Criminals continue to find weaknesses in merchant operations that are processing transactions online and via mobile. This year’s results for channels that are most risky include: About half of merchants (49%) stated that traditional eCommerce, consumers shopping from desktop browsers, is still their highest risk channel Mobile web browser transactions are the next most likely to be considered the highest fraud risk, as indicated by approximately 21 percent of merchants 18 percent of merchants say mobile app payments are the highest risk The support for mobile can vary depending on the type of industry or annual revenue of the merchant. The industries most likely to prioritize mobile (and consider the mobile channel very important to their overall strategy) are merchants selling: Jewelry (71%) Electronics and computers (63%) Health/beauty products (63%) Apparel or accessories (56%)  To read over 50 pages worth of data related to the mobile channel, please download the full report.