Fighting fraud. As merchants sprint to keep up with payment tech innovations, bad actors are creating new ways to defraud companies and consumers alike. Protect your shoppers with secure, seamless payments. Global Payments helps merchants streamline the buying process, no matter where their customers shop. Learn more.
Retail in 2025 never sleeps. Payment technology is advancing and exciting new tools are constantly arriving on the scene. These tools offer enhanced operational efficiency and better customer experiences, must-haves in this competitive landscape.
But along with all this new tech, merchants also have to prepare for new forms of fraud. Juniper Research found that global e-commerce fraud is increasing, with losses expected to exceed $343b from 2022 through 2027.
Here’s the situation: Payments and security are increasingly intertwined, often built in tandem and living within the same systems. And sophisticated attackers are relentless in their efforts to infiltrate this ecosystem with fraudulent transactions, identity theft, and other cyberattacks.
To respond to fraudsters’ latest tactics, payment tech companies, governments, and banks are experimenting with new security measures like biometrics, tokenization, and AI.
We teamed up with Global Payments to learn about the latest fraud trends and how merchants can take advantage of efficiency-boosting tech—without leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks.
Fighting fraud
To fight fraudsters’ new tricks, merchants and institutions are getting creative. The introduction of biometrics and tokenization are cutting edge new tools, providing a hard-to-hack layer of protection. What makes these security measures effective? Let’s find out.
The biometrics boom
Biometrics are specific biological identifiers that combine with tech to confirm your identity (think fingerprint ID, facial recognition, retinal scans, and even vein patterns). These traits are all difficult to replicate, making them useful tools for enhancing security measures.
Because while hackers may be able to guess your cat’s name, it’s far less likely that they can recreate your fingerprint.
Think about the last time you completed a purchase on your smartphone. When you finalized your information at checkout, you may have been prompted to rescan your face or use your fingerprint to confirm your identity. This additional layer of protection helps prevent fraudulent activity, and it also streamlines the payment process.
But as with many new tech offerings, there are privacy concerns to consider. Issues of security and consent are inescapable when discussing biometric security. Merchants using biometrics should ensure that their technology partner is securing the consent of each individual to collect their biometric information.
Next comes how they secure and store the information. To address the regulatory and privacy concerns of biometrics, many companies turn to tokenization instead.
The scoop on tokenization
Payment tokens and cryptograms (aka encoded messages to validate transactions) are another rising star on the security scene. With tokenization, consumers’ devices get assigned a payment credential. Users just unlock their devices using biometrics or a passkey, and they can verify login information using their existing credentials.
Tokenization is taking off in the international market, too. New payment methods that utilize tokens and cryptograms allow users to reduce or avoid exchange fees, all while keeping payments fast and secure.
Here’s how it works: The tokenization process converts sensitive data into unique digital tokens that are securely transmitted using standardized definitions, with no need for complex verification processes. And existing payment systems can deploy tokens regardless of location.
Security without swiping
Tap-to-pay’s popularity has outlived its pandemic-era boom. While adoption took off in an effort to protect personal health and safety, tap-to-pay has evolved to become a preferred payment method.
Tap-to-pay and other contactless payment technology brings both tokenization and biometrics together. The tokenization protects consumer data from third-party inception and biometrics integrate identity authentication, especially for purchases made via smartphone.
A little AI assistance
Okay, so that’s a rundown of select new security measures. Now let’s pivot to a technology that's taking the world by storm: AI. Just like other industries, generative AI is making an impact in the cybersecurity world. By spotting variations in consumer spending and account activity, GenAI can flag potentially fraudulent activity.
And with large language models, AI can alert payment technology companies about activity that differs from an account’s historical activity with surprising…intelligence. Let’s say you’re a season-ticket holder for your local minor league team, but your account suddenly shows big purchases for courtside seats at a pro basketball game. The system might detect potentially suspicious activity and flag the purchase.
AI is also changing the way merchants approach illegal chargebacks, or the practice of credit card providers asking retailers to refund or replace fraudulent or disputed transactions. Traditionally, merchants go through a grueling manual investigation to track down a product from order confirmation and shipment through delivery confirmation.
With AI-enabled tools, retailers can separate legitimate chargebacks from fraudulent claims and even detect patterns that need more investigation.
With new developments come new opportunities for fraudsters to attack. AI’s massive power can be harnessed by bad actors not only for mass phishing but also to constantly check security systems for weaknesses and generate deepfakes.
The lay of the (threat) landscape
New tech gives merchants the power to fight fraud like never before. Fraudsters are developing increasingly creative (and sophisticated) cyberattacks, but companies have the tools they need to understand the threat landscape—from synthetic identity fraud to real-time payment fraud—and get ahead of potential issues. Global Payments helps merchants create secure, streamlined payments across all channels so you can provide your customers with a safe buying experience.
Learn about the trends influencing merchants this year in the 2025 Commerce and Payment Trends Report.
Get started with Global Payments.