Visa Advanced Authorization Blocks $25 Billion In Fraud

Visa has rolled out internal data that indicates its artificial intelligence (AI)-based Advanced Authorization (VAA) security product has helped issuers prevent an estimated $25 billion in annual fraud. VAA is a risk management tool that monitors and evaluates transactions over VisaNet in real time to helps issuer “see” fraud as it happens and shut it down based on its ability to spot emerging fraud patterns and trends.

Over 127 billion transactions flowed across VisaNet in 2018 between merchants and financial institutions on VisaNet last year, and AI was used to analyze 100 percent of those transactions. Each bit of analysis and fraud ranking takes about one millisecond — so financial institutions can approve legitimate and bounce bad ones without the customer ever feeling a delay.

“One of the toughest challenges in payments is separating good transactions made by cardholders from bad ones attempted by fraudsters without adding friction to the process,” said Visa Senior Vice president and Global Head of Data Products and Solutions Melissa McSherry. “Visa was the first payment network to apply neural network-based AI in 1993 to analyze the riskiness of transactions in real time, and the impact on fraud was immediate. By striking the right balance between human expertise and technology innovation, we continue to evolve our capabilities as new AI breakthroughs expand the realm of what’s possible.”

The speed and security of VisaNet, is designed, among other things, to keep consumers engaged in the purchasing process. Data from a Javelin Strategy & Research indicates more than half of cardholders affected by false declines (51 percent) used a secondary payment card to complete the purchase at the same merchant. That runs the risk of a new card taking top-of-wallet status. But the fact that consumers want a faster, easier purchase experience doesn’t mean they want it to be less secure, according to Visa — they just want both.

Visa Advanced Authorization is a layer of fraud prevention used by more than 8,000 issuers in 129 countries.