38 Percent Decline In Credit Card Fraud

Dec 01 2005 : Credit card fraud in Singapore has fallen by 38 per cent in recent months, despite a significant increase in card transaction volume, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Figures from MasterCard confirm this trend, with the SD 4.97 billion spent on MasterCard-branded cards in the first nine months of 2005 incurring a total fraud rate of just 0.019 per cent. By contrast, MasterCard reports that its global card fraud rate is less than 0.08 per cent, while its fraud total in Malaysia runs at 0.0517 per cent and in the Philippines, is currently at 0.048 per cent.

Fraudulent transactions on MasterCard cards run at USD 1.92 for every USD 100 that is spent in Singapore. As banks and card issuers can manage these costs, the case for investing in EMV card security technology remains weak. Visa Asia-Pacific similarly advises that its regional card fraud rate now runs at 0.03 per cent (or 3 cents per USD 100 spent), versus a global rate of 0.07 per cent. In that context, Singapore’s financial industry will need to monitor fraud rates to prevent illegal card activity migrating from other EMV-using countries in the region, such as Malaysia.

Singapore’s credit card market is highly saturated, and many consumers hold three to four cards on average. United Overseas Bank (UOB) is the largest issuer with over one million cards, with DBS next at about 700,000 cards and while OCBC is in third place with 600,000 cards, it claims to have the highest average spend per card. Although this implies that many cards are inactive, many banks are taking a segmented approach to meet customer needs, with Citibank for one, seeking to increase its credit card growth by 20 per cent in 2006, up from 10 per cent in 2005.

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I found this to be really interesting, so often we tend to think that persons in the Asia pacific regions dont have credit cards and, despite declines in fraudulent activity as reported here, as an industry, we're still not actively approaching the international market place.

Ive been trying to explain this to a couple of translation clients we have over the past few weeks and they just dont seem to understand that the Asia Pacific region is a viable marketplace for them.

Regards,

Lee