Visa sharpens fraud detection

Visa is tightening the net around account-to-account (A2A) scams with an enhanced fraud-prevention tool designed to stop suspicious transfers before money leaves a customer’s account.

The platform, Visa A2A Protect, analyses transactions in real time and assigns risk signals to help banks identify suspected fraud. The update includes a new unified fraud score, Visa’s first in-market integration of Featurespace technology. The score aims to give financial institutions faster, clearer signals while reducing unnecessary alerts.

A2A transactions are projected to reach more than 5.8-trillion by 2028, a 160% increase from 2024, according to the Global Instant Payments Market Report. A2A Protect leverages advanced AI and sophisticated transfer learning and gives banks access to critical global risk insights on A2A transactions. Visa says those insights are available without waiting months for models to develop intelligence from a bank’s own transaction data. Banks also do not need to wait for other banks to join a consortium, which Visa describes as delivering results and value from day one. Banks that opt in can incorporate additional network-level signals to enhance detection of emerging threats operating across the ecosystem.

“Fraudsters move fast across payment types, and financial institutions need risk insights just as quickly, without slowing down legitimate payments,” says Walter Lironi, Visa SVP and head of value-added services for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa. “A2A Protect combines Visa’s network expertise with Featurespace’s technology to deliver a powerful new layer of protection that helps financial institutions detect more fraud, earlier.”

Financial institutions that opt into network-level intelligence sharing can use A2A Protect to identify emerging scam hotspots and co-ordinated fraud activity. Visa says these patterns may be difficult for individual financial institutions to detect alone and can help the wider ecosystem respond more quickly to new threats. This can give financial institutions a more complete and earlier view of risk, helping to identify scams before authorisation.

A2A Protect integrates with financial institutions’ current systems through a single API which can reduce implementation time and complexity. Each alert includes a plain language explanation of why a transaction was flagged. This aims to help fraud teams to act quickly and confidently without disrupting genuine customers.

* For more information on how Visa works to prevent fraud across the ecosystem, visit the website here.

* Guido Russo is writer and contributor for Gadget.