A new report from ACI Worldwide illuminates a few of the drawbacks of an increasingly connected world, including a focus on the U.S., where only 54 percent of consumers trust third-party firms with personal and financial data.

ACI Worldwide’s Global Consumer Survey: Consumer Trust and Security Perceptions takes a hard look at the state of the online and mobile security industries, touching on topics such as ecommerce and mobile wallets and perceptions of fraud that surround them. The report also touches on the growth of mobile banking solutions worldwide and security concerns that result from it.

“Fraud continues to rise across the board and has impacted consumers significantly,” said Andreas Suma, global head for fraud and data at ACI Worldwide. “Multiple surveys substantiate this assertion, but ACI’s own report illustrates the increasing impact on the customer.

“For example, in the 2016 survey 17 percent of respondents indicated they have been the victim of multiple instances of fraud over the last 5 years,” he said. “In 2014, the number of respondents was 14 percent.

“And to reiterate, these are consumers that are experiencing multiple fraud attempts.”

Impact report
The report’s findings come as a result of a 2016 survey of over 6,000 consumers in 20 countries. The survey mostly focused on consumers’ perceptions of the ubiquity and severity of online fraud.

Across all regions, the number one fraud concern is theft by computer hacking, where much personal and financial information is kept. In fact, ACI Worldwide’s report found that consumers are generally willing to interact with organizations to mitigate fraud, with mobile being the primary channel through which they wish to engage — 75 percent of consumers reported as being very interested in receiving a call or SMS message to their mobile device.

And although data breaches have been common, consumer confidence in merchants’ ability to protect personal information increased to 43 percent in 2016 from 34 percent in 2014, among the 17 countries surveyed in both studies.

Curiously, while online fraud has been growing under consumers’ noses, their expectations of merchants who deal with their financial information has remained high: 65 percent of consumers indicate they would stop shopping with a given merchant after experiencing fraud or a data breach.

Lack of trust may be behind mass defections of users from Yahoo, which was recently slashed of $350 million dollars of its asking price by acquirer Verizon after it was revealed that the Internet company was subject to a series of crippling data hacks over the course of the past few years. The breach will have widespread resonances in marketing and tech for years to come, and it will be a scramble to determine best practices in its wake, which could be an opportunity for burgeoning entities in cybersecurity and product development to define their business models (see story).

Mobile wallets
Despite the fact that the number one fraud concern was reported as theft by computer hacking across all regions, mobile is still at the forefront of the cybersecurity conversation, especially in developing markets such as India where mobile is commonly the only device used to access the Internet. And while in some markets with very strict data security guidelines, such as Germany and Singapore, consumers report some of the lowest levels of confidence in data security and control, mobile wallet and payments adoption tends to be strongest in emerging markets where infrastructure for other electronic payments options, particularly card payments, is less mature.

A recent report from Oliver Wyman included statistics delineating the hesitance that many users have towards using the internet in certain regards, revealing that 45 percent of British adults are worried about sharing their personal information online (see story).

“Consumers can recognize that mobile payments are a comparable channel to any other payments channel and take appropriate actions,” Mr. Suma said. “In the survey, one of the risk behaviors that invited fraud identified on mobile was leaving devices unlocked, which exposed consumers to fraud if their mobile device was lost or stolen.

“In a survey of U.S. and Mexico, 20 percent of the respondents indicated they left their device unlocked, while in Brazil, that figure increased to 27 percent,” he said. “Consumers should be able to expect that banks and other financial intermediaries who handle their payments are protecting their data end-to-end as well as providing counter-fraud practices and enhanced customer support (e.g. call center or branch as examples) when a consumer experiences fraud incidence or attack.”