This overview was first published in ‘eCommerce Insights and Trends Snapshot: Spain’, an eBook produced in association with our partner ACI Worldwide – and based on data from ACI Worldwide. Download your free copy of the eBook below to gain access to a comprehensive analysis of the insights that matter most when measuring the size and type of opportunities in the ecommerce market in Spain.
In Spain, merchants tend to use more secure payment services, which helps to reduce fraud and blocks many unauthorised transactions. As a result, they are not as vulnerable to account take over or identify theft fraud as in other European countries.
Buying online and picking up in-store is a safe and convenient payment journey for shoppers, and it has seen a decrease in fraud attempt rates over the past year in Spain by 0.2%. Mobile also has seen a slight decrease in fraud attempts, 0.1% for both cross-border and domestic transactions.
Interestingly, even though in Q2 2021 (compared to Q2 2020) there has been a 12.1% increase in cross-border transactions in Spain, the fraud attempts in key verticals have decreased – down 1.2% in ticketing purchases and 0.1% across all mobile.
E-wallets experienced a small increase in fraud attempt rates by volume by 0.4%. This is potentially driven by a 34% increase in transactional volume.
In the recent years, there has been a significant shift in customers behaviour moving to online shopping and fraudsters have taken advantage of that. With a rapidly increasing volume on ecommerce transactions, it is even more pressing to have a strong card authentication process and secure payment methods to protect the customers from fraudulent activities such as identify theft or account take over.
A secure payment method can prevent the customers details from being compromised and used by fraudsters and a strong card authentication process provides an extra layer of security to ensure the transaction is initiated by an authorised user. It is also very important to understand what is normal versus unusual behaviour for each customer to block potentially fraudulent activities at very early stages. With large amount of data, knowing your customers can be a very complex task, but machine learning models can be extremely helpful in analysing historical data for each customer to establish a ‘normal behaviour’ and alerting unusual cases.
Another crucial element is to have the ability to identify transaction details that are associated to fraudulent activities and using that information to identify fraudulent rings and block other fraudulent activities.
In terms of sector trends, travel sales saw fraud slightly decrease, by 0.1%. Telco experienced a 1.4% increase in fraud attempts, as the average ticket value increases by 2% ($4), fraudsters are perhaps trying to capitalise on the increase in ticket size.
However, genuine transaction growth well outpaced the increase in fraud. Digital downloads continue to be attractive to fraudsters, seeing a 1.4% increase in fraud attempts. Retail, however, saw a slight dip in fraud, by 0.5%.
Retail experienced nearly the same fraud attempts for domestic (-0.1%) and cross-border transactions (-0.03%). Digital downloads saw a 0.5% decrease in fraud attempts for domestic purchases, while cross-border purchases had a 0.9% increase in fraud attempts.