This overview was first published in ‘eCommerce Insights and Trends Snapshot: France’, 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 France.
France has one of the highest fraud rates in Europe, which seems to be associated with limited visibility on compromised customer details, so fraudsters can use stolen cards or other details for longer before being detected. However, a shift to more secure payment methods in recent years has helped to reduce fraud, blocking many unauthorised transactions.
Interestingly, e-wallets experienced a significant decrease in fraud attempt rates by volume by 3.3%. This is potentially driven by secure authentication (e.g. biometric scan). Also, perhaps less surprisingly, credit cards and debit cards experienced a drop of nearly 6% in fraud attempts, potentially driven by high security authentication procedures/mandates in place, PSD2, and so on.
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 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.
Substantial regulation governs payments in France and the first quarter of 2021 saw the country enter the final phase of PSD2 compliance, stipulating that merchants implement Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) processes by September 2021 to enhance online transaction security. Soon after, the latest data from CMSPI for September 2021 suggests a European average failure rate of 29%, with France at 22%, compared to data from August 2021.