Visa launches new measures to combat payment fraud

Financial services provider Visa announced a suite of innovative security capabilities to help prevent payment fraud. 

The new capabilities are available to Visa clients at no additional cost or sign-up and utilise the latest innovations in cyber technology including big data analysis, deep learning and cloud monitoring.
The new capabilities are available to Visa clients at no additional cost or sign-up and utilise the latest innovations in cyber technology including big data analysis, deep learning and cloud monitoring. Photo courtesy: Visa

The new security measures, which protect the integrity of the payments ecosystem by detecting and disrupting fraud threats targeting financial institutions and merchants, were revealed at the Visa US Security Summit 2019.  The forum brought together payment industry experts from risk, business and operational departments of financial institutions, merchants, processors and other payment service providers. 

"Cybercriminals attempt to bypass traditional defences by stealing credentials, harvesting data, obtaining privileged access, and attacking trusted third-party supply chains,” said RL Prasad, senior vice president, Payment System Risk, Visa. “Visa’s new payment security capabilities combine payment and cyber intelligence, insights and learnings from breach investigations, and law enforcement engagement to help financial institutions and merchants solve the most critical security challenges.”

The new capabilities are available to Visa clients at no additional cost or sign-up and utilise the latest innovations in cyber technology including big data analysis, deep learning and cloud monitoring.

According to a global report by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Visa, identity verification, data privacy/data theft management, and transaction monitoring are three of the most common frauds perpetrated against credit card users. At the same time, card-not-present fraud that includes e-commerce, phone and mail orders was found to be less frequent but caused more damage to businesses, representing nearly 40% of fraud losses and operational costs. 

New security capabilities announced at the summit include:

  • Visa Vital Signs: Actively monitoring transactions and alerting financial institutions of potentially fraudulent activity at ATMs and merchants that may indicate an ATM cashout attack. 
  • Visa Account Attack Intelligence: Applies deep learning to Visa's vast number of processed card-not-present transactions to identify financial institutions and merchants that hackers may be using to guess account numbers, expiration dates and security codes through automated testing. 
  • Visa Payment Threats Lab: Creates an environment to test a client’s processing, business logic and configuration settings to identify errors leading to potential vulnerabilities. 
  • Visa eCommerce Threat Disruption: Uses new technology and investigative techniques to proactively scan the front-end of eCommerce websites for payment data skimming malware and counters it.