VISA's Artificial Intelligence Tech Blocks Billions in Fraud

Visa announced their Artificial Intelligence powered Visa Advanced Authorization (VAA) solution for financial institutions detected and blocked an estimated $25 billion in annual fraud.

Last year, Visa's global payments network, VisaNet, processed more than 127 billion transactions between merchants and financial institutions. Visa Advanced Authorization (VAA) solution monitored and evaluated every transaction authorizations on the VisaNet to detect and respond to emerging fraud patterns and trends, notes the announcement.

Executive Opinion

Senior vice president and global head of Data, Risk and Identity Products and Solutions, Visa, Melissa McSherry, said, "One of the toughest challenges in payments is separating good transactions made by account holders from bad ones attempted by fraudsters without adding friction to the process. 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."

“Consumers identified Visa as the most trusted company to provide financial services or payments among all payment networks and we believe it is due to Visa’s unrelenting focus on eliminating fraud and protecting the payment ecosystem,” said McSherry.

VisaNet and Artificial Intelligence

Visa used AI (Artificial Intelligence) to analyze 100 per cent of the transactions in each one millisecond. Such quick processing of every transaction helped financial institutions to approve legitimate purchases barring fraudulent transactions in the process.

According to the announcement, Visa is using their Machine Learning models to analyze 500 risk attributes of each transaction, perform further Risks scoring and uses Real-time authorization using integrated, global predictive analytics to detect and prevent frauds. Visa Advanced Authorization works as a layer of fraud prevention to minimize the risk and fraud for financial institutions and retailers.

As of now around 8,000 financial institutions in 129 countries are using Visa Advanced Authorization, says the announcement.