SAN FRANCISCO — Visa has unveiled a series of improvements to its payment detection system that significantly enhance the ability of its global processing network to detect potential electronic payments fraud.
The enhancements to Visa's Advanced Authorization give financial institutions reliable information on which transactions to decline in real time. Visa claims this potentially reduces fraud by billions of dollars per year, while more confidently confirming legitimate transactions to remove friction from payments for both merchants and consumers.
"Cardholders, merchants and issuers all want to have confidence in the convenience and the security of every Visa transaction," Visa spokesman Mark Nelsen said. "The great improvements we've made in Advanced Authorization this year were designed to do just that: fight fraud and its costs to financial institutions and merchants, while also ensuring legitimate transactions are handled with the speed and convenience that consumers and merchants want."
Visa, which made the announcement on refining services at the Visa Global Security Summit, says it's expanded each account profile in its VAA model by adding more transactional history data, as well as with additional neural networks to analyze that data. The profile is a major part of the risk score assigned to a given transaction and provided to the issuer for them to make an authorization decision.