13 November 2009 News

 

Visa readies real-time fraud system for 2010 roll-out

Visa Europe is set to roll out a real-time version of its fraud monitoring system next year. Real-time Scoring, an upgrade to the existing batch-based Visor system, will be introduced in three phases in 2010, said Kevin Smith, senior vice president, fraud management, at Visa Europe.
In April it will add a real-time score, based on behavioural modelling techniques, to the transaction message, allowing issuers to incorporate the data into their systems for determining whether to authorise, decline or refer the transaction.
Later in the summer, it plans to add case management capabilities, so that issuers can monitor transactions that are scored on the borderline of risk criteria.
In the final phase, likely to be in the fourth quarter, Visa will add the ability for banks to define their own rules. This will allow them greater flexibility in how they manage customer sets - some could be along geographic lines, others on types of transaction, for instance.
The Real-time Scoring system is based on the Fico Falcon system. The current Visor system is in use by some 60 issuing banks in Europe, Smith said, and the move to real-time will be a "minimal" upgrade for them, as the processing is hosted at Visa's end.
Because the score is included in the message, the issuer will have the opportunity to catch a fraudulent use of a card at the first attempt - the earlier batch-based system meant that it was only on the second or subsequent attempts that fraudulent use could be intercepted.
Smith says that through its network, Visa sees a great deal of information that individual card-issuing institutions can't, so its data set is richer and gives "more granularity" without compromising personal data.
This means, for instance, in cases where customer data has potentially been compromised through a data breach, it is able to inform institutions of the potential impact on their customers. In another example, it could pass on information about particular modes of fraud in order that the issuers can modify their models.
Visa Europe will be demonstrating the new real-time system at the Cartes exhibition in Paris next week.