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As merchants, consumers, and financial institutions contend with the aftereffects of unceasing data breaches, Visa Inc. is adding new products to help prevent and disrupt payment fraud.
Announced Tuesday, the roster of new products include Vital Signs, which monitors transactions and alerts financial institutions to signs of potential fraudulent activity at ATMs and merchants that may indicate an ATM cash-out attack. Others include Account Attack Intelligence, which applies machine learning to protect against fraudulent card-not-present transactions, and the Payments Threat Lab, where financial institutions can test processing, business logic, and configuration settings to identify errors that may produce vulnerabilities.
A fourth, E-Commerce Threat Disruption, is Visa’s own take on scanning the front end of e-commerce sites for malware that skims payment data. Doing so may identify potential Web-site compromises and limit the amount of time malware might inhabit a site, Visa says, significantly reducing the exposure of customer and payment data.
The impetus for the products comes as digital payments surpassed cash payments worldwide two years ago and online criminals followed suit by targeting financial institutions and e-commerce merchants to try to compromise payment data, says David Capezza, Visa senior director of payment fraud disruption.
“The new security capabilities from Visa flip the script compared to traditional industry approaches to security where organizations are on the defensive,” Capezza says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “The new disruption-focused capabilities enable merchants and financial institutions to be on the offensive, stay ahead of fraud and have a chance to prevent fraud from occurring in the first place.”
A recent Forrester Research Inc. report found that 61% of merchants, acquirers, and financial institutions expect new payment technology to make them more susceptible to fraud. And by 2023, Juniper Research predicts worldwide online fraud losses for e-commerce, airline ticketing, money transfer, and banking services will reach $48 billion.
“The new [Visa] capabilities help financial institution and merchant clients prevent fraud before it happens so they will not be noticeable to consumers,” Capezza says. “If we can significantly mitigate or prevent fraud at the merchant and financial-institution level, consumers will benefit.”
No single solution will keep fraud out of payment systems, Capezza says. “Payment fraud, in general and by extension, has the potential to be disruptive to consumers, but that is where all the security layers and technologies Visa uses to help financial institutions and merchants keep fraud out of the system, like artificial intelligence, really becomes significant,” he says.
Visa says these new services are available to Visa clients at no additional cost or sign-up.
