A fragmented regulatory environment and the rapid transition to digital commerce have spurred several enterprise fraud management (EFM) trends in Asia Pacific. Forrester sees that:

  • Digital commerce drives promotion fraud. Flourishing digital commerce significantly changes consumer behavior, and companies are focusing their marketing spending on online campaigns and promotions. Fraudsters are increasingly taking advantage of these promotions, and the number of coupon hunters and fake accounts in APAC is growing significantly. Promotion and coupon fraud not only cause issues for brands and retailers but are also a headache for banks and other financial services firms. One large Asian bank told Forrester that about 15% of its fraud cases are promotion fraud.
  • Social engineering scams are growing fast. Fraudsters increasingly use social engineering to conduct phone and online scams in APAC. Because transactions resulting from these scams are usually initiated by the social engineering victims (customers) themselves, it’s difficult to prevent them with strong customer authentication alone. One Asian card network has seen a significant increase in such scams in recent years; as a result, it realized how important it is to efficiently share blacklist data such as phone numbers, IP addresses, and suspicious accounts across different organizations.
  • Tech giants and payment firms are increasingly entering the EFM market. In recent years, homegrown tech giants and digital platforms like Alibaba, Grab, and Tencent have announced new EFM offerings. Local payment companies such as 2C2P and Till Payments are increasingly adding EFM capabilities like tokenization and 3DS 2.0 authentication to their offerings. While these new players have some key advantages over traditional EFM vendors — including a deep understanding of business scenarios and massive volumes of consumer data and insights — competitive conflicts and concerns about sharing data with the services still exist. For instance, some e-commerce companies and retailers would have concerns using Alibaba’s software as a service-based EFM solution because of competitive conflicts. This applies to Grab and Tencent if they want to sell their solutions to competing platforms such as Gojek and ByteDance.

We also identified some other trends and gave recommendations to enterprises on how to prepare for these new trends and fraud patterns in our just-released report. Forrester clients can find the full report here. If you are interested in digging deeper into the findings of these fraud management trends or want to discuss EFM in APAC more broadly, please schedule an inquiry.