Visa To Help Gas Stations Crack Down On Fraud

Visa wants to help fuel dealers combat fraud at self-service fuel pumps through the power of analytics data. With Visa Transaction Advisor (VTA), merchants can access risk scores in realtime and identify those that may be coming care of stolen, lost or counterfeit cards.  According to Visa, a pilot test of the program has already shown a fraud reduction rate of23 percent.

“Visa Transaction Advisor uses sophisticated analytics based on the breadth and scale of VisaNet data to flag the riskiest transactions,” said Mark Nelsen, Vice President of Risk Products and Business Intelligence, Visa Inc. “By working with fuel companies to understand their needs, we were able to create a new service that builds on Visa’s predictive analytics capabilities, providing fuel merchants with more intelligence to prevent fraud and improve their bottom line.”

The new service works by Visa analyzing 500 data sets about previous card usage and previous fraud instances after the card has been inserted into the pump. The transaction spits back a score to the merchant, who can evaluate whether additional cardholder information is necessary before authorizing the pump. The system does not require new equipment upgrades to make use of.

“We provide fuel to millions of customers each month through approximately 15,000 service stations in the United States,” said Mike Swillo, US Credit Card Operations Manager, from Shell. “When we consider new solutions and technology it has to have a clear business benefit, be customer-centric, and easy to implement. With no infrastructure investment, we are testing VTA as part of our proactive fraud prevention tool-set to better identify fraudulent card activity earlier in the transaction cycle, without inconveniencing our customers.”

Visa Transaction Advisor is available to merchants through participating U.S. acquirers. So far, Visa is working with acquirers to offer the service to their fuel clients and has already partnered with Vantiv.

“Ease of implementation is a critical requirement whenever we’re talking about a new merchant service,” said Donald Boeding, president of merchant services at Vantiv. “Visa Transaction Advisor builds on existing payment infrastructure, is easy to implement.