Dive Brief:

• In 2013, almost 10% of retailers took mobile payments — a 50% annual increase since 2011 — and 25% say they’ll be taking mobile payments this year, according to a study for NexisLexis by Javelin Strategy & Research.

• Although apps are acknowledged to more often be more secure, 55% of mobile payments are processed through browsers and 38% through apps. The biggest rise in mobile payments, however, is in retail use of mPOS hardware.

• Smaller retailers are increasingly adopting mobile payments but are more likely to be hit with fraud than larger retailers because they don’t employ fraud-detection methods.

Dive Insight:

Mobile shopping is really taking off, and with that comes all of the practical aspects of mobile, including processing mobile payments. There is still a laser-beam focus on Target and other brick-and-mortar retailers over holiday credit-card breaches at POS systems in stores, but the fact is most fraud occurs at “card not present” moments  — over the phone, online, and now, increasingly, via mobile apps or websites. Retailers will want to get in front of this by making sure they have the best identification verification and card authentication systems in whatever mobile payment system they use because they can be sure that cyber-thieves are on top of this trend.