MRC has strong focus on advocacy and e-learning in fraud prevention and payments industry

The MRC has expanded its mission by including a greater focus on advocacy and e-learning in fraud prevention and payments industry.  

Advocacy is of tremendous importance to the MRC merchant members as the payments industry becomes more regulated than ever before.

MRC aims to build a strong collaboration with the card networks enabling the organisation to get advanced notifications about new mandates and providing the merchant voice regarding the changes before they come into effect.

In addition, MRC works with merchants on creating data dashboards to demonstrate the lack of readiness for enforcement of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements. With the EU enforcement deadline looming overhead (December 31, 2020), MRC advocacy work included visiting many regulators to present the worrying data and argue for the need to shift the SCA enforcement deadline.

The third area of focus for the MRC advocacy work is tackling ‘hostile friendly fraud.’ The goal is to stop it where possible and, when it can’t be stopped, to work with the issuers and the card networks to cease coding those transactions as fraud but rather view them as ‘disputed transactions.’

With the acceleration of card-not-present (CNP) payments and shifting consumer behaviour patterns driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, educating the retail industry about ecommerce payments, fraud prevention, and chargebacks has never been more important. To that end, MRC launched a new platform for e-learning, RAPID Edu, a web-based education option offering users the flexibility to take courses at any time of the day, any day of the year.