Even if credit cards aren’t your day-to-day focus, the CFPB’s latest review of the consumer credit card market—which includes data through 2024—offers a useful read on consumer behavior and risk signals that ripple across banking. The headline numbers are a reminder of both scale and strain: purchase volume rose to $3.6 trillion in 2024 (up from $3.2 trillion in 2022), credit card balances exceeded $1.2 trillion (after dipping to $858 billion in early 2021 following the onset of the pandemic), and average APRs hit 25.2% for general purpose cards and 31.3% for private label (“the highest levels since at least 2015”). Consumers were assessed $160 billion in interest charges and paid $31.3 billion in fees in 2024.
Those numbers set the backdrop. But the report also surfaces practical takeaways on fraud and disputes—issues that show up in operations, customer experience, and reputational risk.
Recurring billing issues are a frequent cause of disputes and chargebacks. In 2024, cardholders disputed $9.8 billion in credit card charges, resulting in $5.9 billion in chargebacks. For general purpose cards, the most common dispute reason was a cancelled recurring transaction (subscriptions, membership fees, utility bills), which made up 40% of all disputes. The report also notes that AI is being used to help streamline credit card dispute resolution procedures.
Most reported card fraud is new account fraud. Consumers report far more incidents of new account fraud with the FTC than they do existing account fraud. Over a five-year period, new account fraud represents over 90% of all credit card fraud, compared to less than 10% for existing accounts. The report flags a timing challenge: new account fraud may not be detected “until after the fraudulent account has become delinquent.”
AI is showing up on both sides of payments-related fraud. The report says, “AI is…accelerating the incidence and seriousness of payments-related fraud.” At the same time, it describes fraud-defense applications, including the use of large language models to improve monitoring for fraudulent emails and other communications, and efforts to counter “enumeration” attacks used to find authorization credentials.
Innovation is shifting fraud mitigation. The report notes issuers have experimented with numberless credit cards, though it says this can create challenges for certain issuers in e-commerce transactions. It also points to continued growth in digital wallets, including automated provisioning of tokenized credentials to those wallets, as one way to help address those challenges.
