A major consumer survey, recently reported in Privacy and American Business, finds broad support for using biometrics, such as finger-imaging or iris recognition, to make card transactions more secure. According to the survey, 85 percent of respondents consider it acceptable to use biometrics to make credit card transactions more secure, and 78 percent approve of banks requiring a biometric to withdraw funds from ATMs.
   In the second phase of the poll, 5 percent of respondents said they had personally given a measurement for a "computer-matched biometric comparison," up from 3 percent in late September 2001.
   Opinion Research Corp. conducted a telephone survey of more than 1,000 individuals in each phase of the poll, commissioned by SEARCH, the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics.
   Companies such as Hypercom, BioPay and IDentecheck offer biometric systems geared toward the ISO market. It's their contention that these technologies will reduce fraud enough to pay for themselves. The fraud problem continues to escalate in all areas of payments and financial services, as advancing technologies make it easier for criminals to skim cards, hack into Internet sites, produce fraudulent checks, etc.
   One of the newest fraud fighting products is Chargeback Lookout, from Chicago-based Ezic. The product provides merchants with 24/7 access to their current chargeback information.
   Merchants using the Ezic system rely on Chargeback Lookout to monitor chargebacks and Ezic's Fraud Barricade to reduce the potential for chargebacks. Fraud Barricade, Ezic's configurable anti-fraud toolset with identity, velocity, and order integrity fraud controls, enables merchants to choose which transactions to reject.
   Fraud Barricade enables users to reconfigure any of the fraud controls to block out more potentially fraudulent transactions, which the company says will help minimize chargebacks.
   Other companies offering fraud scoring systems include ClearCommerce, CyberSource, and Authorize.net, but some of the controls for those systems aren't configurable by the merchant.
   Merchants also can send this information to Ezic's Negative Database within Fraud Barricade to protect their assets from additional fraudulent attempts. Ezic's Negative Database can deny transactions by an individual, credit card, or IP, billing or mailing address.
   In January, ClearCommerce unveiled ClearCommerce Engine 5.1, which includes an automated order Review Assistant, expanded support for Visa's Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode payer authentication, and a new payment interface to Wells Fargo.
   "ClearCommerce is committed to helping merchants reduce the cost of fraud through more effective detection and optimized process efficiency," said Robert J. Lynch, President and CEO of ClearCommerce. "This latest product release strengthens our best-of-breed arsenal of risk management technologies and extends our industry leadership in payment processing for online retail."
   This most recent release of the company's flagship software suite introduces a new risk management tool, Review Assistant, which enables merchants, for the first time, to automate portions of the order review process. Review Assistant automatically triggers requests from external data sources to streamline the repetitive and time-consuming manual process currently used by many merchants to verify orders identified as suspicious by front-end screening tools.
   Fraud problems could also give an additional push for smart cards, though their promise has been a long time in coming. The Smart Card Alliance held its annual meeting a few weeks after press time. Hypercom was among the companies making presentations.
   The fraud-fighting technologies have yet to stem the tide of rising interchange rates from MasterCard and Visa, which are due, in part, to the increasing amount of fraud. The card companies are reticent to comment on the interchange issue. But merchants who have too many incidents of fraud will pay higher fees than their peers with few or no such problems. Additionally, if the problem gets too out of hand with a specific merchant, he or she may not be able to find a card company willing to accept any charges.