The payments ecosystem has seen huge changes in the way we move, keep, and spend our money. The shift to a digital landscape has created myriad opportunities to transfer, share and use our finances locally and globally.

The introduction of chip and pin, tap to pay, tokenization, and many more innovations, means it can be easy for clients – both individuals and businesses – to take their financial safety for granted. After all, with so many security checks, authorizations and confirmations required with each spend surely the threat of fraud is, much like paper money and old metal coins, becoming a thing of the past?

Unfortunately, not.

While it is true that cases of fraud are declining if it is left unmonitored, unchecked, and unsecured, even the cashless payments landscape could be vulnerable to all manner of criminality, from sophisticated online hacking and account manipulation to the cloning of cards.

At Visa, this is a problem we are committed to tackling head on as we establish digital payments as the safest and most convenient way to pay and be paid.

Visa Risk Manager (VRM) solution enables real-time approval or rejection of consumer-initiated transactions. Our clients can choose from dozens of data points available in VRM to design, test, deploy authorization and decline rules: merchant name, category, geography, ticket size, and many more. Our recent experience suggests that rules optimization on VRM typically helps clients to recover 3-5% of payment volume by reducing the number of ‘false positive’ declines and also prevents fraud losses between 0.2% and 0.5% of the payments volume processed.

Visa Advanced Authorization (VAA) score is another weapon in our armor which allows us to dramatically improve the accuracy and predictive power of VRM rules. This score assigns risk of fraud to every single transaction, based on the power of VisaNet data behind it.

Visa’s deep understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ payment patterns across all the markets allowed us to develop machine learning models that are scoring and assigning fraud risk level to attempted transactions before they are authorized.

These solutions are developed and promoted in the interest of the whole ecosystem that benefits from Visa fraud management solutions.

Overall, the advancement of small and medium-sized businesses, merchants, and e-commerce across the world remains among the fundamental values of Visa, as protecting its customers remains a priority. That’s why it perseveringly contributes to democratizing and securing payments.

The Visa team recommends simple rules to every cardholder to minimize any risks of becoming scam victims:

• Always keep your banking card in a safe place and never leave it unattended (especially in public spaces). Also, try adding your digital card to your smartphone’s “digital wallets.” Making contactless payments with biometrically protected devices is a very secure method.
• Remember your card’s PIN code and never share it with anyone else, even with bank customer service representatives. If someone asks you while calling you (even if they claim to be from “your bank”), be aware that you are dealing with fraudsters. So simply end the conversation.
• Enabling SMS notifications for your card keeps you always notified when a transaction occurs.
• Set maximum spend limits on your card for both offline and online transactions.
• Do not photograph your card, particularly the back side with the CVV code.
• Never give your credit card information to any internet seller who promises to send you the goods right away.
• Make sure the URL of the website starts with https:// and only buy online from the official merchant and brand websites.