70+ percent of card fraud in Europe involves CNP transactions

LONDON — February 11, 2013 — FICO (NYSE:FICO), the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today released data showing that card issuers using FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager have dramatically cut card-not-present (CNP) fraud losses from credit cards over the last two years, from £28 million in April 2010 to less than £12 million in March 2012. CNP fraud, which includes illegitimate online, mail order and phone transactions, is the most prevalent type of card fraud, accounting for about three-quarters of card fraud in the FICO® Falcon® Fraud Consortium for Europe, which includes 44 million active credit cards.

“CNP fraud is now the top focus for card fraud across the region, as issuers look for new technology and best practices to stop the most widespread form of card fraud,” said Martin Warwick, FICO’s Fraud Chief in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “FICO’s advanced fraud technology is enabling users to outperform the market. For comparison, industry-wide figures from Euromonitor show only modest declines in CNP fraud from 2010 to 2011, with the largest fall at just 6 percent in the UK.”

CNP fraud was behind 72 percent of all accounts victimised by fraud and 74 percent of all card fraud losses in the FICO Falcon Fraud Consortium. This was higher than in last year’s data, where the figures were 69 percent and 72 percent, respectively.

“Criminals are migrating to the easiest way of using compromised cards, which today is the internet,” said Warwick. “For example, fraud as a percentage of internet sales in the UK is 22 basis points (0.22 percent), which is double the rate for credit card transactions overall. In addition, 3D Secure protocols are moving the liability on losses from the retailer to the issuer.

“This puts great pressure on card issuers to resolve the CNP fraud problem, and it’s why issuers are looking at new capabilities in FICO Falcon, such as merchant profiling. As shown in the fraud map of Europe we released last year, countries with the strongest fraud detection systems have reduced fraud relative to countries that are lagging on the technology adoption curve.”

During the analysis window, April 2010 to March 2012, only about 1 percent of cards studied were victimized by fraud.

FICO’s data comes from card issuers in Germany, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. FICO analyzed this data to develop the UK & Ireland Credit version 14 and European Union Credit version 6 analytic models for FICO® Falcon® Fraud Manager. These models are now available for FICO clients in the region, and show a marked increase in predictive power compared to previous models. FICO Falcon Fraud Manager is the world’s leading card fraud management system, protecting more than 2 billion payment cards worldwide.