Securing innovation at scale

Arabian Business

a day ago

As digital commerce evolves, a new paradigm is emerging—one where intelligent systems act on behalf of consumers, shaping the future of commerce. This shift is redefining the digital experience, placing trust and security at the heart of every interaction.
At Visa, we're continuously evolving our platform, unbundling capabilities through our value-added services. This makes it easier for clients of all sizes to access the tools they need and unlock new opportunities across the Visa network and beyond payments.
Digital by default. Security by design
As digital experiences accelerate, so does the complexity of the threat landscape. Businesses and financial institutions are not only driving innovation, but also managing rising consumer expectations and increasingly sophisticated risks. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region exemplifies this digital momentum. With 5G expected to cover 93 per cent of the population by 2030, the region is laying the groundwork for a hyper-connected future.
In digital payments, transaction volumes are projected to reach $193.46 billion in 2025 and near-universal mobile connectivity, setting a global benchmark for digital engagement. Here, consumers don't wait for innovation, they expect it. According to Visa's Stay Secure study, over 80 per cent of consumers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia plan to use digital payments more in the coming year.
However, the same technologies that empower consumers are also enabling fraudsters. Today's threats are real-time, AI-powered, and coordinated. Fraud is no longer the work of isolated actors—it's a service, scaled and sold. Nearly half (49 per cent) of consumers in the UAE have fallen for a scam, with 15 per cent being victims on multiple occasions. Legacy systems weren't built for this. The challenge now isn't just to detect fraud—but to outpace it.
Visa Protect: Built for growth
Meeting this challenge requires more than detection—it calls for a fundamental rethinking of how we secure the entire payments journey. That means anticipating risk, not just reacting to it. Over the past five years, Visa has invested over $12 billion to do just that: enabling seamless, secure payments by identifying and protecting against potential points of friction across the transaction lifecycle. In 2024 alone, Visa helped block $40 billion in fraudulent activity.
This is the foundation of Visa Protect—our AI-native, end-to-end suite of solutions that secure every transaction, on and off our network. With hundreds of AI models embedded across more than 100 products, Visa Protect spans the entire payments ecosystem and every use case. These solutions translate hundreds of risk signals into multiple, actionable scores—empowering smarter and faster decisions. We secure every layer of the payment experience by safeguarding credentials with Visa Provisioning Intelligence (VPI), enabling risk-based authentication with Visa Consumer Authentication Service (VCAS), detecting fraud in real time with Visa Advanced Authorisation (VAA), and intercepting scams in account-to-account payments with Visa Protect for A2A.
To support fraud and risk management at scale, we've built centralised platforms like Visa Risk Manager (VRM)—a network-agnostic solution used by thousands of issuers globally—and Decision Manager, which offers a unified fraud prevention engine for acquirers and merchants across channels and gateways.
Now, with the acquisition of Featurespace, we're expanding those capabilities even further. Featurespace brings a real-time, AI-native platform that delivers a 360-degree view of customer behaviour across all payment channels and upstream events. Its solution enables behavioural profiling across multiple entities—device, account, card, and merchant—allowing for more precise detection of complex, cross-channel threats.
Innovating to keep you ahead
As digital fraud grows in volume and sophistication, Visa is staying ahead by enhancing our powerful risk and fraud solutions with technology innovation. We contine to grow our suite of value-added services, which includes over 200 products covering acceptance, advisory, issuing, and risk and identity. These services empower clients and partners to innovate, grow, move faster, and build trust in an ever-evolving digital landscape.