Visa has announced a new trial that lets Visa cardholders know instantly when a transaction using their card has been made, through a text message.
The idea is to give consumers peace of mind should they be out and about and accidentally lose their card, when they will instantly be let known someone else is using it illegally.
Consumers will be able to receive the alerts via text or email, and iPhone and Android applications have been developed to support the trial as well.
The trial is taking place in the UK along with Visa's member banks, who will in turn make the tech available to consumers.
Power to the people
Sandra Alzetta, Senior Vice President of Innovation and New Product Development at Visa Europe says: "With Visa's mobile alert service, we want to offer cardholders the reassurance of knowing, in real-time, exactly where and when their card is being used. If something looks suspicious, this will give them the power to put a stop to any fraud taking place on their cards."
"We have chosen the summer holiday season to test this proposition as it's the period when people travel most. Feedback from our current pilots indicates that consumers often receive the alerts before their cards are even handed back to them at the point of sale. This real-time capability makes Visa's solution unique."
Visa has also hinted that this mobile integration could be extended in the future, with things like currency conversion when abroad available instantly.
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boomcomms_ltd
August 7th 2009
1. Organisations in the financial services sector are finally realising the potential of SMS technology to improve their customer service offering, enabling access to real-time information and to guard against fraudulent activity.
This latest service from Visa Europe will certainly bring benefits to its cardholders, but it does not complete the circle. Should the customer receive a notification from their cardholder highlighting potentially fraudulent use of their debit/credit card, they are then faced with the lengthy task of contacting customer services to stop the transaction and cancel their card. This process is neither seamless for the customer nor satisfactory for the card issuer, who still bears the administrative burden.
Financial institutions like Visa Europe are missing a significant trick – the full automation of this process using a sophisticated two-way SMS application. This add-on to existing business processes automates and extends the workflow, boosting the customer/employee experience, without increasing costs. With two-way SMS Visa cardholders would be notified of a pending transaction, simply replying “Yes” to authorise the transaction or “No” to decline it. Based on the response received, the database is enabled to continue the workflow process, empowering the customer to instantly react and removing a costly layer of administration for the card issuer.
The crux of such a solution rests on the ability to correlate multiple outbound messages with their specific responses. This means the content of the reply can be fed back directly into the organisation’s database query triggering the next step in the workflow sequence, all without human intervention.
With the long standing ‘reply’ conundrum addressed, two-way SMS promises to be a small but significant revolution in the business-customer/business-employee relationship - breaking down boundaries, enabling direct interaction and bringing greater speed and efficiency into the equation.
Peter Tanner
Managing Director
Boomcomms Ltd
www.boomcomms.com
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