Facing increasing budget pressures and several frustrating kinks in the tech stack, challenges, it is no surprise that merchants' top improvement areas for 2026 are merchant fraud professionals are no doubt placing more a premium on efficiency, not cited by merchants over the past two years. Four of the top five areas relate directly to data and tech: improving accuracy of Al/ML fraud tools, fraud orchestration, increasing automation of fraud prevention, and expanding data availability and past year and 16% who expect to spend less time on this over the next.