Reported by Ariajegbe Sylvia Esezobor
The card is not there. The cash is not there. The only thing standing between a consumer and a completed purchase in the digital economy is trust — and new research from across the payments industry suggests that trust is under unprecedented strain, even as consumers embrace artificial intelligence, social commerce and instant payments with remarkable speed.
The scale of the challenge is reflected in the numbers. Global e-commerce fraud losses are forecast to more than double from over forty billion dollars in 2024 to more than one hundred billion dollars by 2029, according to industry projections. Card-not-present fraud, the category that covers every transaction where the physical card is absent — which is to say, nearly all digital commerce — accounts for more than seventy per cent of all card fraud losses globally and is projected to exceed forty-eight billion dollars in 2026. Financial institution fraud losses are expected to rise by over one hundred and fifty per cent from less than twenty-five billion dollars in 2025 to more than fifty-five billion dollars by 2030. These are not abstract figures. They represent stolen money, broken businesses and, perhaps most consequentially, eroded confidence in the systems that make digital commerce possible.
A major study of consumer behaviour across seventeen markets in Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa, conducted by Wakefield Research for Visa and released in 2026, found that eighty-eight per cent of consumers in Nigeria have used AI tools to assist with shopping. They are comparing prices, finding gift ideas, checking reviews and discovering new brands. Ninety-seven per cent feel that AI-powered tools make online shopping faster and easier. Yet when it comes to allowing AI to complete a transaction on their behalf, only thirty-four per cent would trust an AI agent to check out. The gap between using AI to shop and trusting AI to pay is where the future of digital commerce will be decided.
The findings are echoed globally. Research from Visa released in September 2026 found that only twenty-three per cent of consumers in the United States trust generative AI to handle payment transactions on their behalf. However, when a trusted payments brand is attached to the transaction, confidence shifts dramatically — sixty-one per cent said they would trust Visa to handle agentic transactions. The implication is clear: consumers distinguish between the AI tools they use and the payment brands they trust. Trust, in other words, is portable, but only to institutions that have earned it.
The stakes extend far beyond individual transactions. An enterprise now loses an average of eleven point four million dollars to fraud every year, a seven point five per cent increase year on year, according to Ravelin's Global Fraud Trends 2026 report, which surveyed over fifteen hundred professionals across ten countries. For more than four in ten companies, average annual fraud losses exceed ten million dollars. Beyond direct losses, the reputational toll is severe: eighty-one per cent of merchants agree that customers distrust companies perceived to have weak fraud protection, and sixty-four per cent report a direct stock price drop following fraud-related media coverage.
The fraud landscape itself is shifting in ways that make trust harder to maintain. For the first time, refund abuse has overtaken fraudulent chargebacks in negative business impact, driven in part by the growing use of AI-generated fake evidence to support fraudulent claims. Sixty-seven per cent of merchants report receiving AI-generated fake refund evidence, and AI-supported attacks now account for a meaningful share of fraud losses at many organisations. Yet thirty per cent of enterprises still use no AI or machine learning in their anti-fraud defences at all. Fraudsters are adopting AI faster than the businesses trying to stop them.
The line between customers and criminals is also blurring. Forty-three per cent of merchants report a rise in consumer-initiated fraud, also known as first-party misuse, where legitimate customers abuse refund policies or falsely claim non-delivery. Sixty-four per cent of merchants report increasing rates of first-party misuse, with one-quarter reporting increases of twenty-five per cent or more. Merchants are now evenly split on whether professional criminals or abusive first parties pose the biggest threat to their business.
The regulatory response is accelerating. In Nigeria, the Central Bank issued a circular on March 12, 2026, introducing new mandatory safeguards for instant payment services, effective from July 1, 2026. The requirements include voluntary opt-in and opt-out functionality for instant payments, subject to multi-factor authentication, a cap of twenty thousand naira on transfers for newly activated mobile banking applications within the first twenty-four hours, and mandatory liveness checks to verify user identity. The circular signals a shift in regulatory philosophy: rather than merely facilitating payment speed, the Central Bank now expects financial institutions to build stronger preventive controls into instant payment structures.
For merchants, the challenge is compounded by a paradox at the heart of fraud prevention. When asked why stronger fraud controls have not already been implemented, merchants did not point to cost. Fear of customer friction and brand image concerns ranked well above budget constraints as the top barriers to action. Merchants know they need stronger fraud controls but worry that tightening them will alienate legitimate customers faster than it stops fraudulent ones. The fear of friction is, in effect, slowing the response to a threat that is growing faster than the defences being built against it.
Consumers, for their part, expect institutions to lead. Forty-nine per cent believe banks or financial institutions should be primarily responsible for protecting them against fraud, followed by government authorities and regulators at thirty-five per cent and payment providers at thirty per cent. Only seven per cent believe consumers themselves should hold primary responsibility. They also want more proactive reassurance: sixty-four per cent would feel secure receiving real-time alerts from their bank or payment app when something looks suspicious.
The social commerce dimension adds another layer of complexity. Eighty-three per cent of consumers in Nigeria have purchased products directly through social media platforms, but among those who have experienced a scam, fifty-seven per cent report it happened on social media, more than on any other platform. Children are increasingly exposed: seventy-six per cent of consumers report that children in their lives struggle to recognise scams, and sixty-two per cent have seen a child fall victim while gaming or shopping online. Thirty-three per cent of Nigerian parents have children who can access mobile payment apps or digital wallets.
The path forward is being built on several fronts. Payment tokenisation, which replaces sensitive card data with unique digital identifiers, is now used by seventy-two per cent of merchants. Sixty-three per cent of merchants are actively exploring or planning to implement agentic AI payments in the near future. Forty-three per cent of merchants now accept real-time payments, reflecting rapid growth in emerging payment methods. Successful dispute challenges rose to sixty-two per cent in 2026, up from forty-three per cent the previous year, suggesting that a more disciplined, evidence-led approach is beginning to pay off.
What emerges from the data is a portrait of a digital economy that is expanding faster than the trust infrastructure that sustains it. Consumers are embracing AI, social commerce and instant payments with enthusiasm, but they are not willing to hand over control without assurance. Merchants are investing in fraud prevention but are constrained by the fear of driving away legitimate customers. Regulators are tightening rules but are racing to keep pace with threats that evolve faster than legislation. The card is not there. But neither, for many consumers, is the confidence that the transaction will be safe. Building that confidence — through transparency, accountability and visible protection — is the defining challenge of digital commerce in 2026 and beyond. As the research consistently shows, trust is not a soft issue. It is the infrastructure on which every digital transaction depends.
📩 Stone Reporters News | 🌍 stonereportersnews.com
✉️ info@stonereportersnews.com | 📘 Facebook: Stone Reporters News | 🐦 X (Twitter): @StoneReportNew | 📸 Instagram: @stonereportersnews
Add comment
Comments