PARIS, France, June 30. Visa online retail
loses up to 260 billion euro annually due to abandoned purchases,
Senior Vice President of Product and Solutions at Visa, Mehret
Habteab, said during an information session at the Visa
Payments Forum in Paris, Trend's special correspondent reports from the
event.


According to her, the volume of online purchases today amounts
to trillions, and the number of payment instruments and fraud
protection systems continues to grow. However, a significant
portion of transactions are abandoned at the checkout stage.


"Despite all this development, two out of three online purchases
are abandoned. This means consumers begin the purchasing process
but do not complete it," Habteab noted.


She emphasized that the industry losses due to abandoned
transactions are estimated at approximately 260 billion euro
annually.


According to the Visa representative, ensuring trust in payments
is a key challenge in the context of the new wave of digital
commerce, including generative artificial intelligence (AI), smart
devices, and automated shopping scenarios.


"For the next wave of commerce to scale, people must trust the
payments that happen in the background," she said.


Habteab noted that payment scenarios are increasingly expanding
beyond traditional online stores and into social media, digital
wallets, connected devices, and agent commerce systems.


Moreover, she noted that on social media, users want to make
purchases without leaving the app, while digital wallets have
already become full-fledged platforms with financial services,
loyalty, and search features.


Mehret Habteab also emphasized the role of connected devices,
from wearables to cars and televisions, which are increasingly
becoming standalone payment tools.


Habteab emphasized the development of agent commerce, where
purchases are processed by AI agents on the user's behalf, from
searching and booking to paying for services, without leaving the
app interface.


She also noted that the growing number of retail channels leads
to the fragmentation of users' digital identities, which
complicates risk assessment and increases the burden on security
systems.







"Users make purchases through multiple channels and accounts,
sometimes creating multiple profiles with the same merchant. This
leads to identity fragmentation and complicates the verification of
legitimate activity," she said.


An additional risk factor, she noted, is the rapid growth of
AI-based fraud, which is increasing exponentially every year.


In response to these challenges, Visa is developing a "built-in
trust" strategy, which aims to minimize friction during the payment
process while simultaneously enhancing security.


Key elements of this strategy include improved transaction data
quality, seamless biometric authentication, and expanded use of
tokenization.


According to Habteab, improved data allows issuing banks to make
more accurate decisions when authorizing payments, reducing denial
rates without increasing fraud rates. Individual initiatives have
already shown a significant impact in Europe, where billions of
previously problematic transactions have begun to go through
successfully.


She also noted that biometric authentication allows you to
confirm the user's identity directly in the device without leaving
the purchase process, and the Visa Payment Passkey solution is
already working in 19 countries in Europe and 10 countries in the
CEMEA (Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa)
region.


Tokenization, a technology that replaces card data with secure
digital identifiers, is a key focus of the company's strategy.


"Today, 60–70% of online transactions in our network are
conducted using tokens, and we see a path to 100%," she pointed
out.


According to her, tokenization simultaneously provides a higher
level of security and increased efficiency: a 5% increase in
successful transactions and a 35% reduction in fraud.