36% of Businesses Now Rank Fraud Prevention as Their Top Criterion for Choosing a Payment Partner

Security Has Overtaken Cost as a Selection Criterion

Softjourn’s 2026 fintech statistics compilation found that 36% of businesses now rank security and fraud prevention as the single most important criterion when choosing a payment partner — ahead of the cost and integration-ease factors that traditionally dominated vendor-selection decisions in payments. That figure sits alongside a broader trend in the same data: reducing fraud and chargebacks held steady at 42% priority in 2025, while minimizing fraud-related operational costs specifically doubled in priority, jumping from 10% in 2024 to 20% in 2025 — evidence that fraud concerns are intensifying across multiple dimensions of the buying decision at once, not just headline security ranking.

Independent survey data corroborates the same pattern from a different angle. CAPCO’s US Payment Fraud Survey, cited in payment-fraud trend analysis, found 63% of respondents ranked security among the most important factors in choosing a payment provider, and 50% specifically selected advanced fraud protection — both criteria ranking ahead of customer service, transaction speed, brand reputation, and rewards programs. Two separately conducted surveys reaching the same directional conclusion — that fraud prevention now outranks traditional purchasing criteria — makes the finding more reliable than either survey alone.

What’s Driving the Shift

The same fraud-trend research documents the scale of the problem businesses are responding to: card or card-data theft remains the primary fraud concern for 46% of respondents, with over 90% of credit card fraud occurring while the physical card remains in the owner’s possession — meaning digital and card-not-present fraud, not lost or stolen physical cards, drives the bulk of losses. Account takeover fraud was cited by 35% of respondents as a top concern, and synthetic identity fraud — where fraudsters combine real and fabricated personal information to create credit profiles that don’t correspond to any real person — has grown sharply, with new bank credit accounts linked to synthetic identities more than doubling between mid-2021 and mid-2024.

That growth in fraud sophistication, particularly AI-assisted scams and synthetic identity schemes documented elsewhere in cybersecurity coverage this year, is reshaping what businesses expect from a payment partner. A vendor that processes transactions reliably but offers only baseline fraud tooling is increasingly seen as carrying operational risk, not just a feature gap — which is precisely why fraud prevention has moved from a nice-to-have differentiator to the top-ranked selection criterion in multiple independent surveys.

What This Means for Payment Vendors and Buyers

For payment providers, the practical implication is that fraud-prevention capability is now a primary competitive differentiator, not a supporting feature bundled into a broader product pitch. Vendors that can demonstrate measurable fraud-reduction outcomes — not just feature lists — are positioned to win deals against competitors offering marginally better pricing or faster integration, because buyers have explicitly told researchers that security now outranks those factors.

For businesses selecting a payment partner, the data suggests due diligence should weight fraud-prevention track record and specific capabilities (real-time transaction monitoring, synthetic-identity detection, chargeback-dispute support) more heavily than has historically been standard practice, rather than defaulting to cost or ease-of-integration as the deciding factor.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• 100+ Fintech Statistics 2026 — Softjourn
• Key Payment Fraud Trends Report — Help Net Security