Visa prevents more than $560 million in fraud from impacting Australian businesses

09/15/2020

Visa urges Australian businesses to remain vigilant and lean on global security expertise as commerce continues to shift online


Visa, the global payments technology company, today announced new analysis showing its artificial intelligence (AI) helped financial institutions to prevent more than AU$560 million in fraud from impacting Australian businesses in the 12 months ending 30 June 20201.

Visa pioneered using neural networks, modeled on the human brain, to power its AI platform that analyses the riskiness of transactions in real time, assessing more than 500 risk attributes to identify potential fraud.

“One of the toughest challenges in payments is separating good transactions made by account holders from bad ones attempted by fraudsters without adding friction to the process or declining sales unnecessarily,” said Julian Potter, Visa’s Group Country Manager for Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific.

“Every transaction represents a buyer’s purchase of something wanted or needed and a seller’s step towards business growth, and at Visa, we’re focused on safeguarding all parties involved in this transfer of value.”

Visa’s announcement follows new figures from AusPayNet which show card fraud declined in 2019, including in card-not-present (online/e-commerce) transactions which are significantly more prone to fraud than those made in the card-present (face-to-face) environment. Card-not-present transactions can include one-off consumer-initiated payments, as well as merchant-initiated periodic and regular payments.

“As commerce has shifted online, so has the focus of fraudsters, and while the payments industry’s efforts are bearing fruit, now is not the time to let down our guard. With new players entering online payments, it’s critical that the industry harnesses the expertise of global leaders, like Visa, to identify and combat fraud before it impacts Australian businesses,” said Mr Potter.

In 2019, Visa processed more than 138 billion transactions and used its AI to analyse 100 percent of these transactions – each in about one millisecond.

“The global nature of Visa’s network means we’re able to apply learnings from transactions processed by Visa at merchants in every country and territory we operate in around the world to protect Australian businesses. The importance of this cannot be underestimated.”

Building on its use of AI, Visa has just launched Visa Smarter Stand-in Processing, a new capability that uses AI to help financial institutions manage transaction authorisations when service disruptions occur.

“The most fundamental attribute in global commerce is trust – if a business loses a customer’s trust, they lose sales. Visa’s ability to step in for a financial institution and make authorisation decisions in the event of an outage benefits every business that accepts Visa,” Mr Potter added.
 

Visa’s online security capabilities

For nearly 60 years, Visa has been a leader in payments security and today, fraud rates are at historic lows – less than 0.1 per cent2. Some of Visa’s global security capabilities used to protect online transactions include:

  • Visa Advanced Authorisation: An AI-powered capability harnessing machine learning to examine transactions for indicators of fraud, assessing more than 500 attributes in about one millisecond.
  • Visa Risk Manager: An AI-powered solution enabling financial institutions to manage rules to decline high-risk purchases requiring further investigation to determine if they were made by the rightful account holder.
  • CyberSource Decision Manager: The world’s largest fraud detection radar leveraging more than 68 billion transactions processed annually by Visa and CyberSource and harnessing machine learning.
  • Tokenisation: A payment architecture designed to reduce fraud by replacing sensitive account information with a unique digital identifier called a token allowing payments to be processed without exposing actual account details that could potentially be compromised. This is critical for card-on-file and merchant-initiated payments.
  • 3-D Secure: A risk-based capability enabling greater data exchange between merchants and financial institutions to validate that a transaction has been initiated by the rightful owner of the account.
  • Visa Transaction Controls: An important additional layer of security that empowers account holders by giving them the ability to place their own rules on a payment card’s use and to set up notifications for different financial events.

 

1 VisaNet 2019-2020
2 Visa Global Fraud Data, Visa Inc., April 2019

 

About Visa Inc.

Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) is the world’s leader in digital payments. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, reliable and secure payment network - enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The company’s relentless focus on innovation is a catalyst for the rapid growth of connected commerce on any device, and a driving force behind the dream of a cashless future for everyone, everywhere. As the world moves from analog to digital, Visa is applying our brand, products, people, network and scale to reshape the future of commerce. For more information, visit About Visa, https://usa.visa.com/visa-everywhere/blog.html and @VisaNews.