Visa partners with Pay.UK

The new AI tool for Faster Payments could help save UK over £330m a year on fraud and APP scams

In a groundbreaking pilot in partnership with Pay.UK, Visa, a world leader in digital payments, has shown how leveraging the latest AI technology has the potential to drastically cut the £600m lost annually to account-to-account scams and fraud over recent years in the UK. Results from the pilot announced today reveal Visa identified 54% of fraudulent transactions which had already passed through the banks sophisticated fraud detection systems, suggesting Visa’s proven predictive AI technology is an important contribution to this growing space and could potentially help save £330m for UK consumers, businesses and the economy.

The pilot partnership between Visa and Pay.UK, which runs the UK’s retail payment operations, analysed billions of historic UK retail bank transactions (more than 50% of the annual UK account-to-account transactions), covering a 12-month period. Using advanced AI technologies, Visa successfully identified 54% of the fraudulent transactions that had previously been made.

Visa is now making this innovative real-time fraud detection service, Visa Protect for A2A Payments, available to all banks in the UK. This new technology will help intercept suspected fraudulent transactions in real-time, stopping scams before the money ever leaves the victim’s bank account.

Mandy Lamb, managing director Visa UK & Ireland, commented: “The UK has one of the most developed payment systems in the world, but also sees some of the highest levels of account-to-account fraud. Once fraud happens, the money is in the hands of the criminals so fraud prevention must be our collective goal, in the financial services industry and beyond.

“Visa has already reduced card payment fraud to historic lows, which we are very proud of. We are now bringing our AI capabilities to fight fraud and scams on account-to-account payments before they happen. We are really excited about working with our partners on this – keeping people and businesses safe from scammers is the biggest priority for Visa.”

Kate Frankish, chief business development officer and anti-fraud lead at Pay.UK, commented:  “The positive results from this pilot demonstrate the importance of innovation and cross-industry collaboration in developing effective solutions to stay ahead of fraudsters and protect people in the ever-changing payments landscape. In 2023, the UK saw 232,429 people falling victim to fraud. To reduce the scale of the crime that is happening we need a unified approach, and this future service will be a major step forward.”

The move comes following Visa joining the AWS network.

Image: Growtika on Unsplash

Robert Welbourn Robert Welbourn is an experienced financial writer. He has worked for a number of high street banks and trading platforms. He's also a published author and freelance writer and editor.