Visa Pilots Fraud ID System at the Pump

FOSTER CITY, Calif. -- Visa Inc. introduced Visa Transaction Advisor, a service which enables merchants to use real-time authorization risk scores to indentify transactions that could involve lost, stolen or counterfeit cards at the pump.

According to the payments provider, a pilot test of the service showed a 23-percent reduction in the rate of fraudulent transactions without costly infrastructure upgrades or disruption of the customer experience.

After a cardholder inserts a card at the pump, Visa Transaction Advisor analyzes multiple data sets as past transactions, whether the account has been involved in a data compromise, and nearly 500 other pieces of data to create a risk score. Hence, merchants can identify transactions with a higher risk of fraud and perform further cardholder authentication before gas is pumped, stated Visa.

Visa Transaction Advisor uses existing message fields and formats, as well as a pump's software or hardware to ensure minimal impact to merchants and acquirers.

“Visa Transaction Advisor uses sophisticated analytics based on the breadth and scale of VisaNet data to flag the riskiest transactions,” said Mark Nelsen, vice president of risk products and Business Intelligence at Visa. “By working with fuel companies to understand their needs, we were able to create a new service that builds on Visa’s predictive analytics capabilities, providing fuel merchants with more intelligence to prevent fraud and improve their bottom line.”

Visa has partnered with Vantiv and is also working with other acquirers to offer the service to its fuel clients.

Visa Inc. is a global payments technology provider capable of handling more than 47,000 transaction messages a second.