2026 Trends in Securing Online Transactions

The last few years taught online businesses a hard lesson: fraud is no longer “a payments problem.” It’s a full-journey problem. In 2026, the most damaging attacks and chargebacks won’t come from a single weak point — they’ll come from gaps between systems: identity, checkout, APIs, fulfillment, support, subscriptions, refunds, and disputes.

Below are the trends that are shaping how e-commerce and SaaS companies are protecting revenue and preventing chargebacks going into 2026, backed by late-2025 research and network updates.

1) Chargebacks keep rising, and “first-party fraud” keeps scaling

Chargebacks are becoming easier for consumers and harder for merchants. Dispute flows are now optimized for speed, not investigation, which increases friendly fraud pressure (legitimate customers disputing legitimate purchases). Mastercard’s 2025 outlook projects chargebacks increasing 24% by 2028 and frames dispute operations as a growing cost center if not modernized.
The practical implication for 2026 is that prevention and representment need to be treated as one system: you reduce disputes by improving post-purchase clarity (proof, comms, expectations) and you win disputes by collecting better evidence automatically at the time of transaction and throughout the lifecycle.

2) Network monitoring and dispute thresholds are changing how risk is managed

Visa has been consolidating and evolving dispute monitoring programs (e.g., via VAMP changes and related rollups). This matters because your dispute ratio isn’t just a finance metric — it becomes a “platform health” signal that affects processing risk, fees, and scrutiny. A 2025 breakdown of Visa’s program changes highlights how thresholds and metrics are shifting and why merchants need to respond operationally, not only legally.
For 2026, expect more merchants to invest in “dispute hygiene” as an engineering discipline: clean descriptors, better logs, consistent evidence capture, and tighter refund/returns verification.

3) AI is industrializing fraud — including agentic attacks

Fraud is being operationalized: tools, playbooks, and automation reduce the skill required to attack merchants. Multiple 2025 sources describe a world where automated, adaptive fraud is accelerating, including account takeover patterns and rapidly scaled abuse.
Whether you call them “agentic fraud” or “automated abuse,” the pattern is the same: attacks are faster, more iterative, and more personalized. That pushes defenders toward real-time detection, stronger identity assurance, and better lifecycle correlation (login → purchase → delivery/usage → refund/dispute), not just point solutions at checkout.

4) Account takeover becomes the silent chargeback factory

ATO is often the invisible origin of disputes. When a real customer account is compromised, the resulting chargebacks look “legitimate” unless you correlate identity signals and behavior. In 2025 reporting highlights that ATO is getting harder to spot and faster to scale, requiring adaptive models that react in real time.
In 2026, companies that sell subscriptions (SaaS) are especially exposed because takeover + plan upgrade + rapid consumption + dispute can happen inside a single billing cycle. Stronger login protection and session integrity becomes chargeback prevention.

5) API security and misconfiguration are now top-tier business risks

Most transaction businesses are API businesses. The faster you integrate partners (payments, shipping, identity, analytics), the more your “attack surface” becomes a web of tokens, webhooks, and permissions. In 2025 updates emphasize misconfiguration as a major contributor in real-world testing, and the broader shift continues toward authorization weaknesses as a primary failure mode.
In 2026, the best security teams treat integrations like products: versioned contracts, strict authZ, token hygiene, rate limiting, monitoring, and “fail safe” behavior when downstream systems misbehave.

6) Returns and refunds are being abused as a revenue extraction channel

Returns abuse isn’t just “retail shrink.” It’s a post-purchase fraud strategy, and it’s growing. In 2025 findings show abusive returns rising sharply (including a 64% increase in abusive returns in one comparison window), reinforcing that the return/refund moment is now a primary risk boundary.
In 2026, best practice shifts from “make refunds fast” to “make refunds verified.” The goal is still a great customer experience — but grounded in proof, scan events, and lifecycle integrity.

7) Payments security is converging with trust and safety operations

A notable shift across industries is that “fraud prevention” is no longer a single team. It’s moving toward cross-functional trust: security + payments + ops + CX + data. Visa’s 2025 global merchant research emphasizes the breadth of challenges merchants face and the need for stronger, more unified approaches.
Separately, the European Payments Council’s 2025 threats and trends report highlights evolving threats (including availability and application-layer risks) and the need for dynamic defensive controls.
In 2026, companies that win will have “end-to-end truth” — a way to connect identity, payment, device/session, order/fulfillment, and post-purchase events into one auditable story.

What “good” looks like in 2026

If you’re building or operating a transaction business (e-commerce or SaaS), the modern security posture is less about adding more tools, and more about tightening the journey:

• Strong identity and session integrity (to reduce ATO-driven disputes)
• Evidence capture that starts at checkout and continues through delivery/usage
• Verified refunds/returns and disciplined post-purchase workflows
• API security and integration governance as a first-class system
• Real-time anomaly detection and operational automation
• Dispute operations treated as a measurable, improvable pipeline

That’s the gap Velo is designed to fill: not only preventing fraud, but preventing the operational ambiguity that turns into chargebacks.

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