Real-time payments surge as global e-commerce fraud shows first signs of decline: Report

Global e-commerce merchants are rapidly accelerating the adoption of real-time payments (RTP) as fraud pressures show early signs of easing after years of steady escalation, according to Visa’s 2025 Global eCommerce Payments & Fraud Report.

Based on a survey of more than 1,080 merchants across 38 countries, the report finds that 37 percent of merchants now accept real-time payments, with momentum continuing to build. Among those already offering RTP, nearly 80 percent recorded a noticeable rise in customer usage over the past year, and almost 90 percent expect adoption to climb further in 2025.

Even among merchants not yet offering RTP, the shift is underway. 42 percent say they are likely to add real-time payments within the next 12 months, positioning RTP as one of the fastest-growing payment methods globally.

Encouragingly, rising transaction volumes have coincided with an improvement in fraud outcomes. Fraud rates by order declined from 3.4 percent to 3.0 percent year-on-year, while order rejection rates fell sharply from 5.8 percent to 5.0 percent, reversing a multi-year upward trend.

Yet fraud remains widespread. 98 percent of merchants experienced at least one form of fraud over the past year. The most prevalent threats included refund and policy abuse (47 percent), real-time payment fraud (45 percent), phishing attacks (42 percent), first-party misuse (39 percent), and card testing (32 percent).

While first-party misuse continues to affect a majority of merchants, its growth is slowing. 62 percent reported some increase, but the share experiencing spikes of 25 percent or more dropped to 24 percent, down from 31 percent a year earlier.

Merchants are responding with heavy investments in technology. 56 percent now use generative AI tools for fraud management, up from 42 percent last year, and adoption is expected to reach nearly 80 percent by the end of 2025. Overall, 63 percent plan to increase spending on fraud technologies, compared with just 49 percent planning to expand staff, signalling a decisive shift toward automation.

Alongside fraud control, payment optimization remains a top priority, with merchants focusing on revenue, authorization and success rates, fraud and chargeback losses, authentication, and payment costs. To improve performance, six in ten merchants now use tokenization, primarily to reduce data-breach risk and boost authorization rates.