The Future of Payments and Fraud

In the last five years, Visa has invested USD 10 billion in cybersecurity and in creating a more robust and secure ecosystem. As the first to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the payments industry, we understand the value of this technology for identifying and preventing fraud, which has allowed us to prevent $41 billion worth of fraudulent transactions in the past year alone¹. 

I recently had the honour to present on this topic to delegates at the 2024 Merchant Payments Ecosystem Conference in Berlin.

Learn more how AI is stopping fraudsters in their tracks in this summary article.

Payments has traditionally been a four-party model (Acquirers, Issuers, Merchants and Cardholders), but today there are significantly more players inc. Payment Facilitators and Enablers. Whilst this evolution continues to improve the customer experience, it also results in a much larger attack surface for criminals to exploit. Indeed, criminals are uniting like never before in the dark web and taking more brazen steps than ever to perpetrate fraud. Fraudsters are using audio, text, images, chatbots, video, code, and Generative AI to make their way to consumers’ money. Phishing and malware attacks are becoming more prevalent and new sophisticated use cases are emerging. For example, criminals now have the capability to recreate faces to pass a biometrics test or create a fully functioning voice clone using just three seconds of audio.

Visa is winning the battle against the fraudsters - AI and the emerging large language models are a game-changer in this evolving payment ecosystem and we are taking advantage of these tools to increase our fraud detection and prevention capabilities. AI is allowing Visa to identify patterns and anomalies across billions of transactions in real-time to search for fraudulent activity and to support us in taking action.

AI is also driving personalisation in the retail experience for consumers. In the future, everything is likely to be connected through digital assistants, creating a ‘phygital’ world that is personalised, integrated and seamless for individual needs. Integration between inventory, store, and checkout experience is key. Retailers are using AI capabilities to connect consumer spending and habits across multiple platforms and locations. Creating a personalised shopping experience, both in-store and online, to make it feel like the store was designed specifically for them. This will result in an enhanced and omnichannel checkout experience, reducing cart abandonment.

Visa is playing a leading role in delivering secure payment experiences of the future. We take the learnings we have from more than sixty years of card payments and are applying it to all forms of new money movements inc. Real-Time Payments. We are investing in evolving technologies such as tokenisation and delivering new solutions such as Click to Pay, to enhance the customer journey. The flexibility and operational resilience of Visa’s network means our robust infrastructure can be adapted to meet new challenges; allowing us to stay ahead of the fraudsters.

We are excited to keep building the future: a payment ecosystem where financial transactions are not only more convenient but also more secure and resilient.

Read the full article here (page 30).