Visa Launches Fraud Detection Tool for Card Issuers

Visa today announced a solution designed to help financial institutions create and implement strategies for identifying and stopping fraudulent transactions in real-time at the checkout.

Called Visa Strategy Manager, the company claims financial institutions using the service will benefit from Visa’s pattern-based fraud detection algorithms which helps identify the riskiest transactions. As a result, the system can help determine whether a transaction should be approved, declined or flagged for review.

“Financial institutions have to process thousands or millions of transactions each day. This means that a vast amount of data must be analyzed for fraud risk,” said Mark Nelsen, head of global risk and authentication product development for Visa.”Visa Strategy Manager makes things easier for issuers by automating the process for writing their fraud detection rules, and responding to real-time fraud trends. Without any additional technology investments, financial institutions will be able to pinpoint complex fraud patterns that might otherwise go undetected.”

Visa Strategy Manager builds on Visa Advanced Authorization, a security technology that analyzes and scores every Visa transaction for its fraud potential. Visa Advanced Authorization bases its “risk scores” on a global view of fraud and spending patterns across the entire Visa network. The company says the service can be used in conjunction with Visa Risk Manager, a tool that enables issuers to test and deploy authorization rules within minutes and respond to fraud trends as they evolve. Or, Visa Strategy Manager can be used independently with an issuer’s own host system.

By building customized rules that are based on an issuer’s transactions, Visa Strategy Manager can more accurately target fraud patterns that are specific to an issuer’s portfolio, significantly reducing false positives and costly customer service calls.

Visa said the service will first be available to financial institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by Asia Pacific and Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa by summer 2012.

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