Visa has announced an enhanced version of its A2A Protect solution, designed to help financial institutions stop account-to-account (A2A) fraud before money leaves customer accounts. The upgraded offering introduces a unified fraud score, which is Visa's first in-market integration of Featurespace technology since its acquisition of the company. This new capability provides banks with faster, clearer risk signals to detect more fraud while reducing unnecessary alerts.
Key Statistics and Impact
According to Visa, A2A Protect has been shown to reduce over 50% more fraud and help reduce over 40% in unnecessary fraud alerts. The solution leverages advanced AI and sophisticated transfer learning, giving banks immediate access to critical global risk insights on A2A transactions without waiting months for models to develop intelligence from a bank's own transaction data, and without having to wait for other banks to join a consortium. This delivers results and value from day one.
The launch comes as A2A payments accelerate globally, with A2A transactions projected to surpass 5.8 trillion by 2028, a 160% increase from 2024. This growth underscores the need for robust fraud prevention measures in the digital payments ecosystem.
How A2A Protect Works
A2A Protect combines Visa's network expertise with Featurespace's technology to deliver a powerful new layer of protection. For financial institutions that opt into network-level intelligence sharing, the solution highlights emerging scam hotspots and coordinated fraud activity—insights that may be difficult for individual financial institutions to detect alone. This helps the wider ecosystem respond faster to new threats, giving financial institutions a more complete and early view of risk, helping to identify scams before authorisation.
Banks that opt in can also incorporate additional network-level signals to enhance detection of emerging threats operating across the ecosystem. The solution integrates with financial institutions' current systems through a single API, reducing implementation time and complexity. Each alert includes a plain language explanation of why a transaction was flagged, helping fraud teams act quickly and confidently without disrupting genuine customers.
Industry Perspective
“Fraudsters move fast across payment types, and financial institutions need risk insights just as quickly, without slowing down legitimate payments,” said Walter Lironi, Senior Vice President, Head of Value-Added Services, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMEA), Visa. He added that A2A Protect combines Visa's network expertise with Featurespace's technology to help financial institutions detect more fraud, earlier.
For more information on how Visa works to prevent fraud across the ecosystem, visit Visa.com/security.
