Despite the massive surge in online transactions triggered by the pandemic, payment fraud at Visa actually declined in percentage terms.

Visa’s (NYSE: V) massive investments in AI and advanced analytics enabled the card giant to wrestle payment fraud down to record levels despite the quantum surge in online transactions after the pandemic. Consider this: Since late 2019, the volume of e-commerce traffic has grown by 50%, according to Visa. Peer-to-peer payments on the network more than doubled, while subscriptions to digital streaming services surpassed 1 billion for the first time. But…cyber criminals got practically nowhere with Visa. (Datanami)

Fraud declined on the network

In fact, when assessed in terms of a percentage of dollars transacted, the amount of fraud on the Visa network actually declined.

“Fraud in our network is historically low,” Visa Chief Risk Data Officer Dustin White told Datanami. “We’re talking about $0.07 for every $100 of payment volume. And that’s in the face of over 2 million daily attempts to harm our infrastructure.”

According to White, the company’s investments in excess of $9 billion in cybersecurity and fraud prevention helped keep fraud in check. Of that amount, $500 million went towards boosting the company’s data and AI capabilities.

For example, the Visa Advanced Authorization (VAA) score uses various AI and machine learning techniques to determine the likelihood that a given transaction is fraudulent within 300 milliseconds.

VAA is the “flagship” AI and ML service at the company, White says, and alone prevented $26 billion in fraud in 2021.

Another example is the Visa Behavioral Analytics tool, which thwarts account takeovers and bot-based attacks. Over the past two years, this system has analyzed more than 400 million authentication requests against 12 million unique devices, according to White.

The payments giant has also established cyber Fusion Centers on three continents. These are 24/7/365 shops that conduct security monitoring, incident response investigation, and have threat intelligence capabilities.

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