Visa has unveiled an enhanced fraud-fighting solution designed to help banks and other financial institutions stop fraudulent account-to-account (A2A) payments before customers’ money leaves their accounts.
The global payments giant said its upgraded A2A Protect now delivers real-time risk intelligence and a new unified fraud score, giving financial institutions faster and clearer signals to identify suspicious transactions while cutting down unnecessary fraud alerts.
According to Visa, the new unified fraud score represents its first in-market integration of technology from Featurespace, the fraud and financial crime prevention company acquired by Visa.
Visa said A2A Protect has demonstrated the ability to reduce more than 50 per cent of fraud while cutting unnecessary fraud alerts by more than 40 per cent.
The company said the development comes as A2A payments continue to surge globally, with transactions projected to exceed 5.8 trillion by 2028, representing a 160 per cent increase from 2024.
Walter Lironi, Senior Vice President and Head of Value-Added Services for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) at Visa, said fraudsters were moving rapidly across payment channels, making speed critical in the fight against financial crime.
“Fraudsters move fast across payment types, and financial institutions need risk insights just as quickly, without slowing down legitimate payments,” Lironi said.
He said the enhanced A2A Protect combines Visa’s payment network expertise with Featurespace technology to give banks a stronger layer of protection.
“A2A Protect combines Visa’s network expertise with Featurespace’s technology to deliver a powerful new layer of protection that helps financial institutions detect more fraud, earlier,” he said.
Visa said the solution uses advanced artificial intelligence and transfer learning to provide banks with immediate access to global risk intelligence on A2A transactions.
Unlike conventional fraud models that may require months of a bank’s own transaction data to become effective, A2A Protect is designed to deliver intelligence from day one, Visa said.
Financial institutions that opt into network-level intelligence sharing will also gain access to information on emerging scam hotspots and coordinated fraudulent activities across the payment ecosystem.
Visa said such intelligence could help individual institutions detect organised fraud patterns that might otherwise remain invisible when transactions are examined in isolation.
The company added that the enhanced system can help banks identify potential scams before transactions are authorised, giving fraud teams an opportunity to intervene before funds are transferred.
A2A Protect can also be integrated into existing financial institution systems through a single API, which Visa said would reduce implementation time and technical complexity.
The system further provides fraud teams with plain-language explanations alongside alerts, enabling them to understand why a transaction was flagged and respond quickly without unnecessarily disrupting legitimate customers.
Visa said the enhanced solution is aimed at giving financial institutions a faster, broader and more proactive defence as fraudsters increasingly exploit the rapid growth of account-to-account payments.
