Wire and Debit Fraud with John Meyer // Cornerstone Hot Takes

Wires are so hard to claw back. I think the industry lost about $2 billion last year, and we were only able to claw back about $200 million of that.

Wow.

Once it’s gone, it’s gone. So people are putting in technology to analyze wires in real time to look for things like net-new payees, whether this wire has ever been sent by this user, and all those sorts of things.

When they do their callbacks, they’re even putting in technology that verifies the number they’re calling back to make sure they’re not calling somebody who spoofed the number.

Sort of all the social engineering components of it as well.

Exactly. So that’s on wires. On debit, it’s going up because we’ve moved to a card-not-present world, and the reality is that’s not going away. That’s only going to increase. Now that the pandemic is over, everybody’s gotten used to buying from Amazon and everywhere else.

That’s right.

It’s a lot harder to get back any kind of chargebacks on card-not-present transactions than it is on card-present transactions. And that’s about to get worse with the regulation because more single-message networks with no chargeback rights as a bigger piece of the pie means more fraud, unfortunately.

Absolutely. More fraud that the institution is going to eat.