Nearly a quarter of UK consumers don’t trust on- or offline retailers with their data thanks to a perceived increase in the number of major data breaches hitting the headlines, according to a new global study from payments provider ACI Worldwide.
The firm interviewed over 6,000 consumers in EMEA, APAC and the Americas to find that globally 29% of shoppers don’t trust their retailers.
In fact, UK shoppers were still among the most trusting – with 38% saying retailers’ systems were adequate to protect their data – second only to those in the Netherlands (42%).
UK consumers were also very confident that their merchants use security systems to protect card and account information – whether online (75%) or bricks and mortar (68%).
Just under two-thirds (62%) said they would want a bank to stop all transactions until a fraud alert was resolved.
Hackers are regarded as the biggest threat to their data, with 24% of UK respondents pegging them as the greatest fraud risk. Some way behind came: filling out paper forms that require card details (16%); shopping online (13%); and using a card to pay over the phone (13%).
The perception of law enforcement and government efforts to combat card fraud was pretty negative across EMEA. In the UK, a quarter of respondents claimed that the two institutions were doing a “poor” or “very bad” job, although the majority (58%) rated it as “average”.
Education and awareness raising is an important step to combat card fraud, but the largest segments of consumers in eight of the 10 EMEA countries did not recall having received any info from their financial institutions about how to protect themselves against fraud.
In the UK, a sizeable 41% said they’d received nothing.
Today’s batch of card fraud stats is the second instalment from ACI Worldwide after it revealed last month that 28% of Brits have been affected by fraud in the past five years – the worst country in Europe.