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Micheál Egan, Head of Operations at Retail inMotion and Co-Chair of the Global Board of Directors at the Merchant Risk Council (MRC), sat down with Jim Cho – Checkout.com’s Head of Revenue, North America – to discuss the importance of quality education in combating ecommerce fraud and empowering the world’s payments professionals.
As the discussion began, Checkout.com’s Jim Cho highlighted a pair of worrying statistics.
The first? That, according to Payments.com, 82% of all ecommerce merchants have experienced some sort of cybersecurity attack in the past year.
The second? Juniper Research estimates that fraud-related losses total around $48 billion each year – and that’s just for ecommerce merchants alone.
Against this backdrop, payments and fraud continue to be vital elements of ecommerce that merchants selling online must understand – not only as critical KPIs and as levers to pull to boost revenue and avoid fraud, but to bolster brand reputation, engender customer loyalty, and future-proof their businesses against the vagaries of an evolving, expanding landscape.
It’s this landscape that Micheál Egan – Head of Operations at Retail inMotion, a global in-flight retail specialist – thrives in. And, as Co-Chair of the Global Board of Directors at the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) – the global non-profit association dedicated to upskilling the world’s payments, fraud, and risk management professionals, and whose Fraud Essentials and Payments Essentials courses were recently unlocked through a pioneering partnership with Checkout.com – he believes strongly in the value of education in payments.
You can watch Micheál and Jim’s conversation in full here, or read the main points their chat covered below. First, though, let’s dive into Micheál’s pathway as a payments professional.
“I just knew I had found my people”: Micheál’s payments journey
Micheál Egan’s career in payments began, as so many do, in banking; and Micheál got his start as a graduate engineer at one of the major financial institutions in his native Ireland.
As time went on, his love of figures saw him transition into a data engineering role at another major bank, where he was exposed to the workings of a variety of different bank functions and regions – including lending, financial leasing, and credit card card data.
That irrepressible desire to learn and grow saw him first move roles, and then – as he traded in banking for gaming – industries, too. Soon after, he was approached about a Payments Manager position – and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, Micheál has served on the MRC’s Global Board of Directors for two years, but it wasn’t until 2018 that his first brush with the MRC occurred – when he attended the organization’s annual conference in Las Vegas.
For Micheál, it would prove to be a transformative experience.
“As soon as I entered that event, I just knew that I had found my people,” he recalls. “It was a tremendous event; I was glued to my seat at every session. MRC conferences are excellent opportunities to network with like-minded people, and share stories from the industry.”
Essential education in the ever-evolving payments and fraud space
With ecommerce fraud rife – and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) continuing to morph and mutate – education around fraud and payments, Micheál explains, is paramount.
But the importance of proper payments education, he continues, also reflects the changing nature of payments itself.
“I think in the past, payments has been seen as a cost center; but in more recent years, it’s increasingly becoming viewed as a revenue generator. And a lot of merchants are examining ways they can leverage their payments stack to be able to grow their business as well.”
Yet with this renewed understanding comes several roadblocks to understanding – namely, that the payments space and its terminology still aren’t all that easy to understand.
“The payments industry is well known for its TLAs (three-letter acronyms)” Micheál says. “NSFs, MITs, AFTs, and plenty more. The courses at MRC are designed to demystify a lot of those acronyms and allow us all to speak the same, single language.
Among the MRC’s offerings for ecommerce professionals are five in-person workshops, hundreds of webinars, thousands of educational resources (including benchmarking reports, case studies, and more) as well as the first-ever certification program for the payments and fraud prevention industry. You can earn CPE (Continuing Professional Education) credits through online learning, be taught in-person by industry thought leaders, or browse the MRC’s resource-packed knowledge base in your own time to upskill and develop.
In a recent partnership with Checkout.com, two of these courses – Payment Essentials and Fraud Essentials - are now available to MRC members at no cost.
Both these self-paced courses are, as the name suggests, essential.
Payment Essentials provides a fundamental overview of the payment ecosystem’s key components: including key payments regulations and requirements, emerging industry trends, and best practices for handling online payments safely and securely. Fraud Essentials, on the other hand, delves into what online fraud is, who commits it, and how you can navigate its intricacies: all skills Micheál believes are crucial in today’s climate.
“In the same way you might learn a foreign language to get familiar with it, for when you travel to that country, the MRC’s courses enable you to get to grips with the dialect of payments and fraud. To me, that’s incredibly valuable – especially if you’re speaking outside your domain, to people who may not come from or work in a payments background.”
Pig butchering and silver bullets: the current state of fraud
The importance of fraud and payments education in empowering merchants to overcome the industry’s challenges was a key conversational ball Jim and Micheál bounced back and forth. So it wasn’t long before the question arose: what are those challenges, exactly?
According to Micheál, that depends on both the verticals you operate in as a merchant: be that the sale of digital goods, such as subscription services, or physical ones, like shoes.
“We’re seeing a lot of digital merchants and subscription-based businesses face a lot of account takeover (ATO) attacks at the moment,” Micheál says. “Why? Because fraudsters want to get to the data within; they want that personal identifying information so that they can go on and do more damage thereafter. For merchants in the physical side of ecommerce, however, the last few years have seen an uptick in refund abuse.”
Micheál also highlights the growing influence of a form of fraud known as ‘pig butchering’, which Erin West – Santa Clara’s Deputy State Attorney, whose office calls her the “face of the battle against crypto scammers” – spoke about at the MRC’s most recent members-only conference, which unfolded over three days in September 2024.
‘Pig butchering’ involves a fraudster gaining a trust of a victim (the ‘pig’) – often using attractive profile images to do so – before introducing an investment scheme that promises alluring returns in short time frames. After ‘fattening up’ their target through long conversations and the cultivation of a fraudulent identity, the ‘butchering’ occurs when the fraudster disappears, stealing the money the victim thought they were investing legitimately.
“Erin gave a fantastic presentation about this form of scam, and how they’re so easy to be lured into. The work Erin and her team are doing to educate people around that is brilliant, and that brings us back to the MRC – and why what Checkout.com is doing to sponsor these initiatives is so important. This education is so crucial because it allows us to know more about what’s happening globally. Because what might start off in one particular part of the world can very quickly, and very easily, spread these days.”
The seemingly infinite scope of AI to be misused makes Micheál’s comments even more poignant. He draws on one common scam – a fraudster sending an SMS to a (usually older) person, claiming to be their close relative, and encouraging them to replace their son or daughter’s real number in their phone with the fraudster’s. Well, what about when it’s not an SMS, but a phone call – and when, thanks to AI, the voice at the other end of the phone is a perfect replica of the victim’s relative’s?
“Advancements in technology have been great at bringing us better methods of payments – at making it a lot easier for customers to pay. But as soon as you make it easier for a customer to pay, you also make it easier for the fraudster to pay. It’s the same with AI: while companies are using it to simplify processes, fraudsters are harnessing it as another weapon to create synthetic identities, and be able to impersonate the victim or their loved ones.”
Another challenge facing the intertwined payments and fraud spaces? The common misconception that fraud can be eliminated completely. “Once you shut a fraudster down in one vertical,” Micheál explains, “they’re just going to start up in another one. It’s like whack-a-mole – and unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet or ‘one size fits all’ solution.”
Learning with the MRC: not just a course, but a community
It’s clear that, when Micheál lauds the impact of the MRC’s educational offerings for payments and fraud professionals, he’s not doing it because he’s on the board. He truly believes in the courses’ ability to make a wider difference: which is why he was so quick, when he started as Head of Operations at Retail inMotion, to introduce them to his team.
“It’s been hugely impactful, here at Retail inMotion, being able to access those courses for free,” Micheál – who has taken the Payment Essentials course himself, and will soon be launching into Fraud Essentials – says of Checkout.com’s partnership with the MRC.
“The big impact of the Payment Essentials and Fraud Essentials courses – and Checkout.com making them free to members – is that it’s not only the payment professionals in your organization that will benefit, or the fraud professionals alone. It’s your finance team; your product people; your C-Suite. With access to this, if you ever find that people are asking what an authorization rate is, or what an insufficient funds is, you can point them to Payment Essentials. Or, if they want to learn more about account takeovers, you can direct them to Fraud Essentials and they can learn about attack vectors.”
Aside from free access, through Checkout.com, to the MRC’s Payment Essentials or Fraud Essentials course, MRC membership also enables you and your team to unlock the expertise and experience of its community – insights members are always willing to impart. That’s because, aside from webinars to get involved with, members can also enjoy access to member-driven forums. “These forums are fantastic because you can actually reach out to others within the community when you have an issue,” Micheál says. “Very often, when you experience an issue, somebody else has gone through it first – and there are always plenty of members ready to reach out or respond to you to help you troubleshoot it.”
Setting the standard: what might the future hold for the MRC?
Speaking about the breadth and depth of the MRC’s educational offerings – which, he notes, also include courses on cryptocurrency, tokenization, and payment orchestration – Micheál believes the next hurdle to surmount is to make them available to an even wider array of payments professionals; and this widening of the net is something Checkout.com’s sponsorship of the Payment Essentials and Fraud Essentials courses is enabling.
But how wide could that net be cast?
“I would love for the MRC’s Payment Essentials and Fraud Essentials courses to become not only a standard among payments and fraud professionals”, Micheál says, “but across the industry at large. What if, for instance, we could roll it out – similarly to what Checkout.com is doing – across other payment processors as standard? And from there, if we could roll it out to the schemes as standard, too? Could we then partner with issuers as well?”
In fact, working with issuers is something the MRC and Micheál are already doing. The MRC hosts a Merchant Issuer Executive Committee (MIEC), which invites voices from many of the space’s biggest global issuers to meet every four to six weeks to discuss the hottest topics and issues facing merchants. “Always on the agenda are questions of ‘What are the common problems these issuers are facing – and how can we resolve them?’
“By bringing more and more members of the ecosystem into that conversation and then providing them with the education they need, we’re all speaking the one language.”
This idea – of communicating in a single, universally understood tongue – is central to Micheál’s beliefs around education in the fraud and payments space; and an analogy he returns to again in his view of the MRC’s courses as playing an important role in onboarding new payments and fraud professionals, and introducing them to the industry. And, on a macro level, of implementing a kind of simple, jargon-free, demystified industry lexicon.
“From somebody at the start of a payment journey – let’s say at the point of sale, or at the bank itself where the payment is taken – all the way to when that money is settled in a merchant’s bank account, we can ensure that everyone is familiar with the terminology. And that, across the whole ecosystem, we’re all speaking the same language. That’s what I envisage for the future of these courses – and why I encourage everyone to sign up.”
Want to join Micheál, Jim, and the thousands of other payments and fraud professionals accessing free education through Checkout.com’s partnership with the MRC? Enroll in the Merchant Risk Council’s Payment Essentials course today to brush up on your payments knowledge, or dip your toe into Fraud Essentials to protect your business against cybercrime.
