In a new research report, The Enemy at the Gates: Payments Fraud Is a Symptom, Mercator Advisory Group discusses the increased cyber threat faced by financial institutions and their clients and how that helps to create opportunities for payments fraud schemes. Payments fraud is a symptom of the broader issue of cybercrime, but it can also be somewhat independently controlled or minimized. In this report Mercator reviews the underlying issues around the global fraud threat and their relation to payments fraud and identifies actions that financial institutions and their clients can take to help manage the threat going forward.

“The cost of dealing with fraud incidents goes beyond the actual financial loss, with aftershocks ranging from client dissatisfaction to damaging reputational hits, something of particular concern to financial institutions given follow-on regulatory actions,” commented Steve Murphy, Director of Mercator Advisory Group’s Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service and author of the report. “Managing the threat requires a series of actions including process controls and systems deployment to identify, prevent, and limit the damage.”

The report is 18 pages long and contains 6 exhibits.

Companies mentioned in this research note include ACI, BAE Systems, Cisco, CSC, CyberSource, Experian, FICO, FIS, Fiserv, Guardian Analytics, HPE, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Verizon.