Card tricks from across the Pond.

At last …. anti-fraud measures that work! A fall in online card fraud, from $4bn to $3.3bn, is the first year-on-year reduction in revenue losses for US and Canadian merchants since 2003. And UK online retailers can learn from it.

CyberSource, which polled 352 merchants, says the percentage of revenue respondents predict they will lose in 2009, on average, is 1.2%, the lowest estimate in the 11 years the firm has conducted the survey.

The report suggests that a significant factor in the fight-back is greater use of automated decision tools to sort orders – now used by 67% of those polled, compared to 56% the year before. 33% changed their procedures to respond to fraudsters and 68% now track the success of orders they have manually reviewed. Last year, only 54% of merchants tracked those successes and failures.

60% of merchants with e-commerce sales greater than $5 million reported a priority for next year being an improvement in the automated detection and sorting capabilities of their systems. 20% are looking to improve their process analytics capabilities, and 16% are focused on streamlining the tasks and workflow around manual review.

Commenting on the report, Stephen Whitlam from the Banking Team of Expense Reduction Analysts said, “These are powerful figures as a reduction in fraud losses of 17.5% is of major significance. I am certain that many UK online retailers will pick up the action points as they tackle their own shrinkage issues. Any wide review aimed at reducing business costs in a retail environment should always consider measures to control fraud and this report is an example of just why that can help the bottom line”