Visa talking to UAE banks on payment security innovation to contain fraud

Visa, the payments technology company, is talking to the UAE and other regional banks about innovation in payment security to lower the incidence of fraud, and the single biggest spending by the company is on security.

Through mobile phone location, Visa seeks to determine the location of client at the point of sale, make use to chip technology, use biometrics among other new methods to ensure safety of transactions.

“Every single time you use your payment card. We look at 500 different data points to determine if it is good or bad. We are refining that risk code. We know that incorporating this cell phone location and add tremendous amount of data to that risk,” Mark Nelsen senior vice-president of risk products & business at Visa Inc. told Gulf News in an exclusive interview.

“We are talking to banks in the region as to how to integrate that in the mobile banking apps. We are constantly looking at new sources of data to determine is this a genuine card holder or is it a fraudster,” Nelsen said.

Innovation:

“We would see completely innovative and new ways to pay that are way beyond using the card and mobile devices. We have been working on this,” Nelsen said,

Google pay has devised a payment mechanism that could match and check the picture of the client with that already in the system, without the use of cards or mobile phone.

“If we look forward, we would be able to create biometrics to create payment mechanism by waving your hand, or finger prints or through a picture. But the challenge is to deploy the technology at scale as the company would be looking for enough merchants to deploy that technology,” he said.

“We are seeing pockets of innovation in some markets but it’s a long way before we see it being of mass usage,” Nelsen added.

Spending:

The massive amount of innovation has happened through tokenisation technology.

Tokenisation, which is being used to enable mobile payments, is an encryption of the 16 digit account number through a different number, and payments is processed through a token number by merchants to avoid any misuse of data in case if it is stolen.

Dubai innovation Centre to be launched

Visa, which already has a couple of innovation centre in the United States, will launch its Dubai Centre soon.

Dubai innovation centre will be the second to join centres in the United States like New York, San Francisco. Visa also plans to open similar centres in Singapore and London.

“Innovation centre will be a collaborative space for clients, merchants and key partners to start thinking about biometrics,” Nelsen said.

Dubai would be a hub for central and eastern Europe, Middle East and North and rest of Africa.

SOURCE:GULFNEWS