The Financial Fraud Action UK recently released its Year-End 2015 Fraud Update. This report, filled with fraud-related figures from a fully EMV(chip)-migrated country, provides insight into what the future of fraud in the United States might look like as we are approximately eight months into our EMV journey. And if indeed the United Kingdom’s experience is a harbinger of things to come in the United States, then I think there will be disappointment for anyone who thought EMV by itself would be a magic bullet. After I spent time studying this report, it became evident that customer authentication is the latest low-hanging fruit and fraudsters are having a feast.

Fraud losses on payment cards in the United Kingdom (£567.5m) are approaching pre-EMV migration levels, and fraud loss rates have increased above 8 basis points (0.08%), hitting a level last seen in 2009. Diving deeper, we find that:

  • As expected, card-not-present (CNP) fraud losses represent a majority of card fraud losses (70 percent). Interestingly though, ecommerce spend volume grew faster than ecommerce fraud losses in 2015, suggesting that the industry made headway in its efforts to mitigate ecommerce fraud.
  • Lost and stolen card fraud (remember, the United Kingdom is a PIN environment) increased more than 24 percent in 2015, reaching levels last seen in 2006. The report highlights distraction thefts through cameras or simply shoulder surfing as methods of fraudulently obtaining PINs.
  • Card ID theft fraud losses, defined as losses from spend on fraudulently opened or obtained cards through stolen personal information, increased by 28 percent and are now approaching counterfeit card levels.
  • A bit of good news is that counterfeit card fraud losses remain well below pre-EMV levels and fell even further in 2015—perhaps, as the report suggests, driven partly by the increased acceptance of EMV cards in the United States.
  • Beyond cards, remote banking fraud losses (losses from Internet, telephone, and mobile banking) increased by more than 134 percent during the last two years, totaling nearly £169 million.

EMV is performing exactly as expected and doing a phenomenal job of authenticating payment cards in the card-present environment. Why are fraud losses increasing in a mature EMV environment? Because customer authentication remains a challenge, as is evident by rising fraud losses from lost and stolen cards, card applications with stolen identities, and remote banking.

Whether on the front end of authenticating the user during the account opening process or the back end of authenticating the user at the time of payment, authentication measures are coming up short, and these measures include PINs and passwords. Replacing passwords has been an ongoing conversation and likely may continue to be a conversation piece rather than a prolific action item. Yet there is a growing push for the use of PINs coupled with EMV cards here in the United States. While PIN authentication is an improvement over signature authentication, it, too, has its flaws. With improvements and advancements in new technologies such as biometrics, perhaps it's time for the industry to advance beyond PINs. Because of the current signature-laden EMV environment in the U.S., the timing is perfect.

By Douglas A. King, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed