The share of retailers now selling through a mobile channel is rising steadily but as many as two-fifths of merchants don't know how much fraud comes from their mobile sales.

The data comes from the 2016 Mobile Payments and Fraud survey by Kount, which surveyed some of the key players in the US payments industry (merchants, fraud and eCommerce service providers, acquirers, card associations and card issuers). The following are some of the key findings:

• 78 per cent of merchants in 2016 actively support the mobile channel, up from 68 per cent in 2012;
• 42 per cent of merchants cannot detect the type of device transacting with them;
• 43 per cent of merchants don't know what share of total fraud comes from the mobile channel.

The data above shows that, while mobile payment channels (which include use of mobile phones or devices for buying online, as well as paying in shops with a mobile phone) are being increasingly offered by retailers and adopted by consumers, there is still a serious data gap in how companies are monitoring and checking information from their mobile sales channel.

While relatively few consumers in North America are using mobile payments – less than one in five according to a 2015 survey by Accenture – it's a market that is inevitably set to grow. Research by IT and communications consultancy and market analysts Ovum suggests that the global user base for mobile payments was estimated at 690 million users in 2014. They predict this will increase almost seven-fold in the next four years, to 4.77 billion users by 2019.

With such a massive increase in the mobile payments market set to happen imminently, it's clear that all companies offering a mobile sales channel – whether it's an in-shop near-field communications (NFC) payment from a mobile phone or an online purchase on an e-commerce site, mobile app or on social media – need to take mobile payments data seriously.

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CTMfile take: Corporate treasury needs to know what type of device is making the payment and above all, cases of fraud need to be carefully tracked so that preventive measures can be implemented to reduce security risks from mobile channels.