Payments and credit card giant Visa has revealed that its proprietary scam-busting technology, Visa Advanced Authorisation (VAA), has helped to prevent the loss of more than $700 million over the last year to scammers globally.

Planned for rollout in Australia this year, the artificial intelligence-based, real-time fraud monitoring solution evaluates payment transactions made via VisaNet – Visa’s electronic payment processing system for e-commerce transactions – to detect potential anomalies in payees’ patterns and behaviour.

These transaction behaviours are assessed against a preexisting and anonymised dataset and compared against the spending behaviour of billions of other accounts.

Promising “rapid risk assessments”, once the VAA flags a transaction as high-risk for fraud, Visa will alert the issuing bank to accept, decline or gain approval from the legitimate payee (likely through a 2FA authorisation) for a payment transaction.

Visa said the technology is “uniquely built for instant payments”, providing a multi-financial institution risk analysis feed.

“Deep learning artificial intelligence models are continuously enhanced to help financial institutions detect clusters of potential scam behaviours in real-time. APIs can be used to receive real-time transaction scores that can also be incorporated into existing risk and fraud management tools and processes,” Visa said.

Visa reports that its VAA solution has prevented the loss of around AU$714 million (US$470 million) to scammers over the last year – which is more than double the prevented losses, in dollar value terms, from 2021.

The technology, Visa said, is the result of its pioneering use of “neural networks modelled on the human brain”.

The company reports it has several hundred AI models in production powering more than 100 products and services, including the VAA, which can assess more than 500 risk attributes in around a millisecond to provide a real-time risk score of all transactions across VisaNet.

Visa’s head of risk for Asia Pacific Joe Cunningham said the VAA’s prevention of more than $700 million in fraud over 2023 “is an incredible testament to Visa’s AI-powered security capabilities, yet… also a sobering reminder that security has to keep pace with innovation”.

He added that the rapid growth of real-time payments within Australia across the Asia Pacific region “presents a challenge for financial institutions to balance the convenience of near-instant payment with the need for security”.

“We’re finding that a little friction in the system to help assess risk can be a good thing.”