Visa Strategy Manager Boosts Issuer Fraud Detection

SAN FRANCISCO, April 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) announced today a new global solution called Visa Strategy Manager to help financial institutions create and implement strategies for identifying and stopping fraudulent transactions in real-time at the check-out.

Through this service, financial institutions will benefit from Visa's cutting-edge, patent-pending algorithms, which help detect fraud patterns. Using this algorithm, Visa Strategy Manager allows financial institutions to target the riskiest transactions with customized fraud strategies and determine whether a transaction should be approved, declined or flagged for review.

"Financial institutions have to process thousands or millions of transactions each day. This means that a vast amount of data must be analyzed for fraud risk," said Mark Nelsen, head of global risk and authentication product development for Visa Inc. "Visa Strategy Manager makes things easier for issuers by automating the process for writing their fraud detection rules, and responding to real-time fraud trends. Without any additional technology investments, financial institutions will be able to pinpoint complex fraud patterns that might otherwise go undetected."

Visa Strategy Manager builds on Visa Advanced Authorization, an industry-leading security technology that analyzes and scores every Visa transaction for its fraud potential. Visa Advanced Authorization bases its "risk scores" on a global view of fraud and spending patterns across the entire Visa network. Because VisaNet processes more electronic card payments globally than other networks, Visa is uniquely positioned to identify fraud on individual accounts and coordinated attacks on multiple accounts across the system. Visa Strategy Manager will give issuers an enhanced capability to stop fraud at the check-out, before it occurs.

The service can be used in conjunction with Visa Risk Manager, a decisioning tool that enables issuers to test and deploy authorization rules within minutes and respond to fraud trends as they evolve. Or, Visa Strategy Manager can be used independently with an issuer's own host system. U.S. issuers can also use Visa Strategy Manager with Visa Debit Processing Services (DPS) solutions.

"Visa's suite of fraud detection solutions – Visa Advanced Authorization, Visa Risk Manager and now Visa Strategy Manager – highlights the value of intelligent authorization capabilities that can effectively reduce all types of fraud from the center of the network with minimal investments by the industry," Nelsen added.

By building customized rules that are based on an issuer's transactions, Visa Strategy Manager can more accurately target fraud patterns that are specific to an issuer's portfolio, significantly reducing false positives and costly customer service calls.

Visa Strategy Manager's sophisticated approach to rules development easily scales across product lines, allowing issuers to expand their fraud detection. "Visa Strategy Manager allows a business to scale up without adding staff, and that's a big advantage as a business grows," said Nelsen.

The service is initially offered to financial institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and will be extended to Asia Pacific and Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa by summer 2012.

About Visa Inc.: Visa is a global payments technology company that connects consumers, businesses, financial institutions and governments in more than 200 countries and territories to fast, secure and reliable digital currency. Underpinning digital currency is one of the world's most advanced processing networks—VisaNet—that is capable of handling more than 20,000 transaction messages a second, with fraud protection for consumers and guaranteed payment for merchants. Visa is not a bank and does not issue cards, extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers. Visa's innovations, however, enable its financial institution customers to offer consumers more choices: pay now with debit, ahead of time with prepaid or later with credit products. For more information, visit www.corporate.visa.com.

SOURCE Visa Inc.

Sandra Chu, Visa Inc., +1-415-932-2564, globalmedia@visa.com, or Jay Hopkins, CRC Public Relations, for Visa Inc., +1-703-683-5004 ext. 107, jhopkins@crcpublicrelations.com