New technology is designed to make our lives as consumers
easier and more accessible. With the development of Smartphones, mobile tablets,
mobile apps, and cloud networks, consumers can take care of all their personal
needs on one device. Greater functionality does not come for free though.
Consumers put their personal information at serious risk when using different
technologies. Mobile banking and online transactions have posed two of the
biggest threats to ID theft. Twenty-three out the top 25 ranked banks in the US are offering some
sort of mobile banking service and nearly 90% people make purchases or financial
transactions online. Yet, 65% of these consumers believe that fraud is more likely to happen online than in person. This is the
foundation of the fraud prevention war. The battle between consumer convenience and security
sometimes poses a conflict of interest, making it very hard to find the right
balance.
Online merchants have the worst end of this battle because
the trade off is much more significant. When consumers use mobile banking, security
is one of the major factors that they consider going into it. Banks are not
facing the same fraud prevention issues that online stores are. Nearly half of the consumers
using a tablet or Smartphone for a transaction have experienced a transaction
delay due to a secondary ID verification process that takes too long. This delay can cause consumer
frustration that leads to termination of the purchase or going to a
competitors site instead. Online stores that fear this change in buying
behavior may be tempted to remove their ID verification process to keep consumers happy.
Some online commerce sites are still using manual reviewing
processes on transactions that seem suspicious. This strategy sends the user to
another page to verify their identity, thus making the consumer frustrated.
Sites need to integrate their ID verification
and authentication system into their shopping platform so consumers are not
redirected. In the end, preventing fraud and consumer security will win the war
on fraud even though it may not win every battle. By using a third party ID
verification company like EVS,
companies will be able to integrate their fraud prevention measures right into their site and avoid lose transactions.
