August 8th, 2014 by Elma Jane
Visa Inc., the global leader in payments, is helping U.S. fuel retailers prevent credit and debit card fraud at the pump with intelligent analytics that identify higher-risk transactions that may be fraudulent. Visa Transaction Advisor uses sophisticated analytics based on the breadth and scale of VisaNet data to flag the riskiest transactions by working with fuel companies to understand their needs, creating a new service that builds on Visa’s predictive analytics capabilities, providing fuel merchants with more intelligence to prevent fraud and improve their bottom line. While global fraud rates across the Visa payment system remain near historic lows, less than 6 cents for every $100 transacted – fuel pumps can be targets for criminals because they are often self-service terminals. The new solution, Visa Transaction Advisor (VTA), enables merchants to use real-time authorization risk scores to identify transactions that could involve lost, stolen or counterfeit cards. A pilot test of the new service showed a 23 percent reduction in the rate of fraudulent transactions – all without costly infrastructure upgrades or disruption of the customer experience.
How It Works
After a cardholder inserts the card at the pump, Visa analyzes multiple data sets such as past transactions, whether the account has been involved in a data compromise and nearly 500 other pieces of data to create a risk score. This allows merchants to identify those transactions with a higher risk of fraud and perform further cardholder authentication before gas is pumped. The time and costs associated with resolving fraudulent transactions can be substantial for both merchants and financial institutions and inconvenient for cardholders, which is one of the reasons why fraud prevention is critical. Visa’s solution is easy to implement, using existing message fields and formats as well as pump software or hardware to ensure minimal impact to merchants and acquirers. Several fuel merchants who piloted the technology over the last several months noticed a decrease in fraud, without negatively impacting their consumers’ experience. VTA as a tool help mitigate fraudulent transactions. A 23 percent reduction in the rate of fraudulent chargebacks during a pilot program in Los Angeles. This was done with minimal impact to the customer experience, making secure payment at the pump as convenient as possible. Providing fuel to millions of customers each month through approximately 15,000 service stations in the United States, said US Credit Card Operations Manager, from Shell, considering new solutions and technology it has to have a clear business benefit, be customer-centric and easy to implement. With no infrastructure investment, testing VTA as part of proactive fraud prevention tool-set to better identify fraudulent card activity earlier in the transaction cycle, without inconveniencing customers.
Visa Transaction Advisor is available to merchants through participating U.S. acquirers. Visa has partnered with Vantiv and is also working with other acquirers to offer the service to its fuel clients. Ease of implementation is a critical requirement whenever talking about a new merchant service. Visa Transaction Advisor builds on existing payment infrastructure, is easy to implement and flexible enough to allow customization by merchants.
Posted in Credit Card Security, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: account, acquirers, analytics, authorization, card, cardholder, counterfeit cards, credit, Credit Card Operations, customer, data, debit, financial institutions, fraud, higher-risk transactions, Merchant's, payments, Rates, retailers, terminals, transactions, visa, Visa payment, Visa Transaction, Visa Transaction Advisor, VisaNet, VTA
February 3rd, 2014 by Elma Jane
The migration to cards that use chips instead of magnetic strips, known as EMV technology, is well underway in the U.S. No government regulation is needed to make it happen. But the EMV migration and the Target breach are different things. It’s true that EMV chip cards can prevent criminals from producing counterfeit cards using stolen account numbers. But EMV doesn’t stop criminals using stolen cards online. So innovators are deploying new technologies to deter other forms of fraud.
Headline-grabbing events inevitably lead to calls for new laws. But in the case of our nation’s electronic payments systems, new government mandates would stifle marketplace innovations that hold great promise for providing consumer benefits and reducing criminal activities.
Financial institutions compete for customers by providing consumer protections even beyond requirements of current law. Many retailers also offer customers speedy transactions, such as “sign and go” and “swipe and go” for small transactions, while the payments industry ensures consumers still have zero liability. These protections and flexibility are why U.S. consumers are going cashless and carry more than one billion debit and credit cards. More than 70% of retail purchases are made with electronic payments, and our member companies process more than $4 trillion in electronic payments each year.
Fraud accounts for fewer than six cents of every $100 spent on payments systems – a fraction of a tenth of a percent. U.S. companies have made significant financial and technological investments, building sophisticated fraud tools that insulate consumers from liability. To build on this, Congress should foster greater international law enforcement cooperation to fight cybercrime, particularly in countries that harbor crime rings, and replace 46 divergent state breach notification laws with a uniform national standard.
The private sector is best positioned to address the constantly shifting tactics of criminals, and it is doing so without government mandates. Do Americans really want the government in charge of the security and monitoring of our payments?
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit card Processing, Credit Card Security, Electronic Payments, EMV EuroPay MasterCard Visa, Financial Services, Visa MasterCard American Express Tagged with: counterfeit cards, cybercrime, data breach, debit and credit cards, electronic payment systems, electronic payments, emv chip cards, emv technology, fraud, liability, magnetic strips, migration, online, security and monitoring of our payments, small transactions
