Visa continues to invest in security to keep cardholders safe every day
COVID-19 accelerated many existing trends, including how we pay for things. As we began to shop more online and use contactless methods in-store more than ever before, digital payments increased. Visa is constantly investing in innovation to develop fast and secure ways to pay, helping protect merchants and consumers and creating a network that works for everyone. In the past five years, the company has spent more than $9 billion to boost cybersecurity and reduce fraud. As a result, despite an uptick in digital payments, Visa has continued to see a low global fraud rate of 0.1%, with fraud rates for contactless cards falling.
Visa has made a number of innovations across products, platforms and services to ensure any new form of money movement is secure. This focuses on two aspects – protecting Visa’s network from potential threats and providing our clients and partners with proactive defence.
Our global data centres monitor Visa’s network to ensure our systems continue to operate and help process transactions all over the world, while our cyber fusion centres monitor 24/7 for potential threats to the network. Our 1000 full-time cybersecurity specialists work to protect Visa’s network from malware, zero-day attacks and insider threats, working alongside machine learning models to predict and fix potential points of network vulnerability to stop risks before they happen.
On the client side, Visa’s security scans and checks client systems for suspicious activity and vulnerabilities. Vulnerability testing alone saved clients ~$31 million in prevented fraud in FY21. In another instance, Visa helped to prevent ~$2.2 billion in attempted fraud using the Visa Account Intelligence tool, which uses AI and machine learning to catch fraud before it starts.
AI is a powerful tool in preventing fraud and Visa deploys the data from its global networks in the fight against fraud. Thanks to the $500 million investment in artificial intelligence and data infrastructure, for example, Visa can power over 60 different AI capabilities that can automate much of the heavy lifting in fraud detection — a time-consuming task that many clients are doing manually today. One service alone, Visa Advanced Authorization, helped prevent an estimated $26 billion in fraud in 2021.
Our commitment to fraud prevention extends beyond the significant investments in our security infrastructure. For example, in February this year, we launched a campaign in the UK focusing on educating consumers about how to protect themselves from fraud. This was one of the largest campaigns ever run by Visa in the UK.
Visa’s continuous commitment to upholding the security of our network and protecting customers has meant that the overall fraud rate with Visa cards in the UK is down. As the trend towards digital payments continues, Visa is focused on ensuring that payments are seamless, simple and above all secure, allowing all of us to continue paying with confidence, every day.
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