Visa enhances A2A Protect to stop fraud before money leaves the account

Visa announced an enhanced version of A2A Protect, delivering real-time risk insights that help banks stop account-to-account fraud before money leaves customer accounts.

The expanded solution introduces a new unified fraud score—Visa’s integration of Featurespace technology—giving financial institutions faster, clearer signals to detect more fraud while reducing unnecessary alerts.

As account-to-account (A2A) payments accelerate globally, A2A transactions are projected to surpass 5.8 trillion by 2028, a 160% increase from 20241.

A2A Protect leverages advanced AI and sophisticated transfer learning and gives 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, delivering results and value from day one.

Banks that opt in can incorporate additional network-level signals to enhance detection of emerging threats operating across the ecosystem.

“Fraudsters move fast across payment types, and financial institutions need risk insights just as quickly, without slowing down legitimate payments,” said James Mirfin, Head of Risk and Security Solutions, Visa. “A2A Protect combines Visa’s network expertise with Featurespace’s technology to deliver a powerful new layer of protection that helps financial institutions detect more fraud, earlier.”

For financial institutions that opt into network level intelligence sharing, A2A Protect highlights emerging scam hotspots and coordinated fraud activity – insights that may be difficult for individual financial institutions to detect alone, and that help the wider ecosystem respond faster to new threats.

This gives financial institutions a more complete and early view of risk, helping to identify scams before authorization. In fact, Visa A2A Protect has been shown to increase fraud detection by 75% in the first six months of deployment.

A2A Protect 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.