Visa Inc (V) To Use Smartphone Location Data To Curb Credit Card Fraud For Travelers

Visa Inc (NYSE:V) desire to improve on the card payment experience while one is travelling has seen it unveil a new service that reduces unnecessary card declines often triggered when transactions are initiated away from home. The new service Visa Mobile Location Confirmation uses a mobile geo-location to verify whether an account holder is the one who has authorized a given payment.

Location of an account holder will be verified via a cell phone or other mobile devices on record allowing banks to feel more confident about authorizing a transaction that might have been declined out of suspicion of fraud. Visa Inc (NYSE:V) notes that financial institutions spend hundreds of millions of dollars in managing customer calls related to pre-travel requests.

Visa Inc (NYSE:V) hopes that by the new service can be able to reduce declines by as much as 30% in the process of impacting millions of transactions annually while improving cardholders experience. The new offering is optional and will be offered via mobile applications of participating financial institutions.

Finsphere Corporation will be providing Visa Inc (NYSE:V) with an analysis of account holders device location data, which will be matched with a given transaction location in less than a millisecond. A transaction will be approved whenever a given card holder mobile device is in the same location as the payment transaction.

To gain access into the new service cardholders will be required to download their card issuing financial institution mobile banking app and agree on the usage of their mobile location for fraud detection purposes. Mobile Location Confirmation is another brilliant innovation from Visa Inc (NYSE:V) that is to provide financial institutions with more information for curbing fraud that should provide better processing experience for consumers.

Visa Travel Authorization tag is another innovation that card issuers could use to identify when a given card holder is travelling thereby shield them from any fraudulent activity even if they did not share travel information.