Geo-location tech to reduce cards declined when abroad

Visa Inc., the multinational financial services corporation, has introduced a new mobile service designed to reduce unnecessary purchase declines.

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Visa Inc., the multinational financial services corporation, has introduced a new mobile service designed to reduce unnecessary purchase declines.

These declines are often triggered when consumers travel outside of their home area.

Visa Mobile Location Confirmation uses mobile geo-location information to more reliably predict whether it is the account holder or an unauthorised user making a payment with a Visa account.

Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk products and business intelligence at Visa Inc., said: “Wherever you are in the world, we want Visa transactions to be the most secure, convenient and seamless payment choice.”

“By matching the location of the cardholder through a cell phone or other mobile device, to the location of the purchase, Visa’s new service will enable banks to feel more confident about authorizing a transaction that might otherwise have been declined due to suspicion of fraud.”

Unnecessary transaction declines can be frustrating for the travelling cardholder. By providing financial institutions greater intelligence when approving transactions, Visa expects to reduce such declines by as much as 30%.

The optional service uses mobile geo-location data in real-time as an additional input into Visa’s predictive fraud analytics.

Finsphere Corporation, a provider of identity authentication analytics, provides Visa an analysis of the account holder’s device location data, which is then matched with the transaction location in less than a millisecond, right at the point of sale.

When a cardholder’s mobile device is in the same location as the payment transaction, the issuing financial institution can more confidently approve the transaction.

The service will be available to U.S. card-issuing financial institutions in April 2015.