Visa Inc has introduced an advanced fraud prevention technology to step up security for India’s banks and provide greater protection for Visa cardholders.
Visa Advanced Authorisation (VAA) and Visa Risk Manager (VRM) offer financial institutions real-time protection and responses across Visa’s entire global network.
The move is likely to sit well with the regulatory direction that recently stressed the need for all India’s banks to adopt proactive real-time fraud detection, increase consumer protection, and proactively identify and deny fraudulent transactions.
Several Indian banks have already adopted the technology. Visa’s new technology detects emerging threats and helps shut them down on the spot. VAA/VRM also has the ability to pinpoint and address coordinated attacks on multiple accounts in real time.
In 2010, Rs 8,250 crore (or $1.5 billion) global fraud avoidance opportunity was identified by VAA.
“Securing and building trust in the card payments landscape is of paramount importance to us. To ensure optimum consumer protection, we are securing all our payment channels with participation in two-factor authentication for e-commerce, issuance of EMV/chip cards and implementation of Visa’s real-time fraud solution for monitoring domestic and international transactions,” said Mahesh Rajaraman, Senior Vice-President and Head of Risk Control, HDFC Bank.
Jairam Sridharan, Head of Consumer Lending and Payments, Axis Bank, said: “Building customer confidence in the security around electronic payments is important. With the RBI guidelines around securing card transactions in the country, we too have implemented the real-time fraud solution to further strengthen our transaction monitoring capabilities.”
Uttam Nayak, Group Country Manager, India and South Asia, Visa notes said, “Visa’s unique ability to analyse up to 24,000 transactions per second that cross our global network, and then immediately act on that intelligence is what separates this from other local or international systems. We can literally spot a needle in the haystack.”
VRM enables banks to turn VAA’s unique global insight into immediate action by creating custom responses to decline or query suspicious transactions in real-time. Given the different criteria for different institutions, VRM lets issuing banks tailor their responses in line with their risk profile and their risk criteria.
Currently, fraud detection is primarily based on identification, alarm and response. However, it is difficult to identify global fraud schemes.