The rise of technology has brought about a rise in card fraud in recent times. Most card users make purchases via their mobile devices and are prone to hacking and fraud.
Visa is offering its banking partners location tracking features which will verify your location on your smartphone whenever your card is swiped. If the locations don’t match up, it doesn’t mean the transaction will be automatically declined – sometimes your phone’s battery goes dead or you leave it in your home but Visa uses it as an additional input for its fraud detection algorithm.
And if it does get a location match, then there’s far chance the bank will decline a legitimate transaction even if otherwise looks suspicious. Visa estimates that such mistakenly declined transactions can be reduced by 30 percent with the new tech.
Visa gets into your phone by working with card-issuing banks to embed a location-tracking module into their regular banking apps. Whenever the card is swiped, Visa partner Finsphere, a geospatial analytics company, pings the app for a coordinates and then reports its findings to Visa in real time (Visa says the process takes less than a millisecond). The feature will be available to banks in April, so hopefully we’ll see it soon.
An independent service called PinPoint in 2010 was launched by Finsphere and Location Labs performing many of the same calculations, alerting users to possible fraudulent transactions. The difference here is Finsphere’s work with Visa directly affects whether a transaction is approved or declined.
You have to opt into the service, so your banks won’t track you — at least not wirelessly — without permission.
