Fraud Tech Spending Rises as Merchant Staffing Plans Stay Flat
PYMNTS data show 63% of eCommerce merchants plan more fraud-technology spending while 51% expect fraud-staffing budgets to stay flat or decline.
Merchants are putting more money into fraud technology while keeping fraud-team budgets tighter, PYMNTS wrote from its fraud-prevention coverage based on a Spreedly-backed study.
The budget split is sharp.
Among global eCommerce merchants, 51% expect fraud-staff spending to hold steady or fall, while 63% are planning higher investment in fraud-management technology.
That leaves retailers and payment teams trying to improve detection through better coordination rather than simply adding more reviewers.
Fraud orchestration is the operating model behind that shift.
A shared decision layer can bring together identity checks, behavior signals, device data, transaction scores and payment-routing choices.
The goal is to decide which orders need extra screening, which can move faster and which should be sent through a different payment path.
Checkout friction is a major constraint.
The study found that 85% of merchants rank fraud prevention that does not harm the customer experience as their top challenge.
Another 47% estimate that up to 5% of genuine orders are incorrectly rejected as fraud.
Those missed sales turn fraud controls into a commercial issue as much as a security issue.
A limited staffing plan changes the practical answer.
More analysts can review more borderline orders, but the budget pattern points toward automated triage: technology determines when extra checks, manual review or routing changes are needed.
In that model, orchestration is measured by whether it helps a leaner fraud operation handle more signals without blocking good customers.
The evidence is strongest where the percentages meet the workflow.
A merchant that spends more on tools but not on people still faces more complex attacks, more payment options and higher expectations for a quick checkout.
A common decision layer can cut repeated checks and focus human review on the orders that carry the most risk, but the coverage does not show that merchants have completed that transition.
The immediate business question is whether technology spending can absorb the pressure that staffing budgets are not taking on.
For now, the documented condition is clear: eCommerce merchants expect more fraud-management technology, limited staff growth and a continuing need to protect legitimate customers from being blocked at checkout.
