Visa: Minimizing Fraud Risk And Protecting Merchants Amid The Digital Shift

“New government policies ultimately changed the way the majority of businesses interacted with customers, with new phrases like ‘buy online, pick up in-store’ becoming part of the nomenclature,” says Andre Machicao, senior vice president of CyberSource, Visa. Here, Machicao explains how his firm helped clients protect themselves from escalating fraud risks with the COVID-triggered wave of CNP payments.

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Andre Machicao, senior vice president of CyberSource, a Visa solution.

The payment and fraud landscape is almost unrecognizable today compared to just a few short months ago. We saw years of change happen in a few months due to COVID-19. The massive shift to digital forced businesses to quickly pivot their models to accelerate the move to online. New government policies ultimately changed the way the majority of businesses interacted with customers, with new phrases like “buy online, pickup in-store” becoming part of the nomenclature. These changes did not come without a massive undertaking by business owners.

The pandemic required a majority of our merchants to quickly shift from card-present (CP) to card-not-present (CNP) payment processing options, causing a spike in transaction volumes that could lead to fraud vulnerabilities. At the same time, their fraud or eCommerce teams were reduced or temporarily furloughed because of the financial impact of the pandemic. Our teams jumped in around the clock to help provide solutions to ensure that these businesses were protected.

One example of how we quickly responded to our clients was by offering an additional layer of fraud detection as they transitioned to CNP payment options. We activated trials of additional services with our partners to yield the best possible conversion rate, while keeping fraud in check.

These services required no additional development resources by the merchant and provided extra data attributes that enhanced insights in Decision Manager. We optimized the risk score, which helped to reduce manual reviews and increased acceptance rates of good customers during this stressful time of shrinking budgets and resources. These trials provided additional coverage as merchants tried to understand the new purchasing patterns and behaviors of their customers in order to modify their business processes to accommodate these changes.