Visa, the world’s leader in digital payments, has updated its new security roadmap to protect merchants, consumers, and all members of the payments ecosystem, ensuring fast, convenient, and secure digital payments for everyone.
Lockdown measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of digital technology and resulted in rapid growth of the digital commerce industry. Increased reliance on digital commerce saw both consumers and small and medium-sized businesses adopt new habits as entrepreneurs established their online presence to ensure their businesses survived during the lockdown, and consumers bought more online.
Visa has forecasted that about 31% of all commerce in Thailand will take place on digital platforms by 2025, growing considerably from the today’s figure of 20-23%.
Four years ago, Visa set out to create a roadmap for digital payment security in response to the quickly changing landscape in Asia Pacific which saw consumer’s embrace online shopping. As digital transactions and payments increased, and there was a clear indication that this new way of shopping was here to stay, Visa monitored the situation to ensure paying digitally was safe.
Although the digital payments volume has increased over the past two years, the incidence of cyber fraud is proportionately decreasing. There are typically two types of cyber fraud.
First is an enumeration attack, in which criminals attempt to randomly select the 16-digit credit card number, expiration dates, and CVV numbers hoping to find the right combination. Cybercriminals attempt to buy cheap items for less than a dollar from an online store, trying thousands of number combinations until they get the right set of numbers. Once verified, they use the card numbers – known as credentials – to make more purchases, or they sell the credentials to other criminals.
These frauds take place all over the world. Japan and Australia see more than other countries in Asia-Pacific, but the United States and Europe also face this problem as well.
Even if no one loses money, repeated transactions create problems for the back end of businesses. For example, when 100,000 transactions attack a small shop within 10 seconds, the operating system loses stability.
Joe Cunningham, Regional Risk Officer for Visa in Asia-Pacific, said, “Visa acts on behalf of our customers to detect possible enumeration attacks and block them from the system before customers see those transactions. They never even know what happened.”
Visa uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to identify, investigate, disrupt and prevent a large number of enumeration attacks, doing so with the utmost care while also ensuring customer transactions take place without disruption.
The second form of fraud prevalent today are scam, and scam links, bogus emails, SMS with text and links are on the rise today and they are very annoying for the public. In Singapore, the government has issued a regulation that prohibits financial institutions from sending any links to cardholders.
Visa also encourages financial service institutions to stop sending SMS to users as this will improve security.
Visa has developed solutions that can identify and protect against complex attacks. One of its solutions is Visa Advanced Authorisation, a technology that analyses more than 500 data elements to generate a risk score for each transaction. This a solution has helped banks prevent an estimated US$26 billion in fraud globally during 2021 [1].
Visa also released the latest version of EMV 3D, a security technology for authenticating the identity of cardholders. This new version allows authentication functions for merchants and digital payment service providers to increase security at every payment step. Visa also see the importance of biometrics, such as facial recognition (Face ID) technology to enhance payment security, creating seamless transactions for the consumer’s convenience.
“Trust is the most valuable asset that Visa receives from the customers, and it is not something that can be ignored. Visa’s role today is to build a secure digital payment ecosystem by working with partners and retailers to expand the use of technology to protect merchants and cardholders from falling victim to theft and illegal transactions,” Joe Cunningham added.
Visa urges stakeholders in the ecosystem to leverage the use of security technology to make paying for goods and services even safer. The company also wants to push for further education among consumers and merchants to help them grasp the digital commerce trends so they can really benefit and thrive.
“Visa continues to invest in building a strong payment infrastructure and is investing in the token system to replace sensitive payment information, such as those on the cards. We have also invested in the authentication system, so our cardholders and merchants will receive the most secure online payment experience,” Joe concluded.
[1] Visa prevented an estimated $26million in fraud through the use of artificial intelligence (AI). https://s29.q4cdn.com/385744025/files/doc_downloads/Visa-Inc_-Fiscal-2021-Annual-Report.pdf
