Visa Intelligent Scoring of Risk (VISOR) is, according to Visa, an advanced neural network system that scrutinises card transactions to deliver a highly accurate risk score by analysing the spending behaviour of each cardholder along with the profile of each merchant.
Developed in partnership with decision management technology firm Fair Isaac, the system works by analysing all transactions that pass through Visa's own payment processing system, known as VisaNet.
For each transaction VISOR will check:
The cardholder profile, including previous spending patterns.
The merchant profile.
Up to 240 regional, country or bank specific fraud detection rules.
Each analysis results in a score, and the higher the score the greater the probability of fraud. If the score is above a threshold set by the bank, an alert is sent so that the bank can view the details. These details will include the risk score, amount, currency and other account transactions over the past week.
The bank then decides if the transaction is fraudulent, and feeds the results back into VISOR.
The system has already been piloted by Barclays Bank International in Germany, ICS in the Netherlands and the Nationwide in the UK. A full roll-out of the system is planned from January this year, with the phasing out of Visa's existing fraud detection system, CRIS Online 2, by the end of March.
John Chaplin, Executive Vice President of Visa EU said:
"With growing fraud losses across Europe, fraud detection is an essential tool for any card issuer. Early pilots indicate that Members are seeing an increase of anywhere between 15 to 60 per cent in fraud detection rates, depending on the number of transactions scrutinised. These immediate short term results confirm that VISOR will be a powerful tool for our Member banks to combat their exposure to fraud."
