Global payments giant Visa has expanded its global value-added services portfolio with the addition of ‘ARIC Risk Hub’, a new fraud prevention platform aiming to help protect banks, acquirers, and financial institutions against a broad spectrum of fraud and financial crime.
Powered by Featurespace, a developer of real-time artificial intelligence (AI) payments protection technology, which Visa acquired in December 2024, the ARIC Risk Hub leverages adaptive AI to build profiles around genuine customer activity, maximising approvals and stopping bad actors and fraud attempts in real time.
A partnership with Eika Gruppen, an alliance of 46 local banks in Norway, highlighted how utilising the latest AI technology can drastically reduce the billions lost to fraud and scams every year. After implementing the ARIC Risk Hub, Eika Gruppen saw a significant decrease in successful fraud attempts across its customer base, with a 90 per cent reduction in phishing losses in 2024 compared to 2023.
“Accepting a payment is a fundamental need of any business,” commented Antony Cahill, president of value-added services at Visa. “Leveraging new technology to accept payments more efficiently and securely can be what sets a business apart in today’s rapidly digitalising world. With our new services, we’re helping businesses harness data-driven insights, simplify the checkout experience, and fight fraud more effectively than ever.”
Featurespace’s ARIC Risk Hub, a Visa solution, is available globally today, offering businesses a new AI-powered tool to help combat fraud and protect their customers.
Tareq Muhmood, head of value-added services, Europe at Visa, also added: “We are thrilled to integrate ARIC Risk Hub into our offer to businesses and financial institutions. We have been using AI for over 30 years to fight fraud, and now, by integrating behavioural data with ARIC’s cutting-edge technology, we will further help our clients to stay ahead of emerging threats.”
Addressing challenges in Norway
Banks across Norway have experienced a surge in fraud attempts in recent years, particularly in the form of phishing attacks that primarily target elderly customers.
The sophisticated attacks by fraudsters made identifying and preventing attacks using existing systems increasingly difficult, while the increasing volume of payments meant that manual reviews were placing unsustainable demands on time and resource, as well as increasing the likelihood of accidental error.
ARIC Risk Hub was implemented to learn the behaviour patterns of Eika customers and establish a ‘normal’ baseline, meaning that, when live, the technology could more accurately flag suspicious behaviour in real-time with minimal false positives.
Jon Hagen, chief architect at Eika Gruppen, said: “Featurespace’s unique AI-powered technology learns and adapts in real-time, and profiles normal user behaviour in an efficient manner. As fraud patterns evolve, we will need to add more rules and maybe adjust some of the old ones. Adjustment of the rules is easy, given the powerful support of the Featurespace system.”
Tim Vanderham, chief operating officer at Featurespace, also said: “Born out of Cambridge University 15 years ago, Featurespace’s mission is to help businesses make the world a safer place to transact. We enable our customers to access the latest technology in fraud prevention through the ARIC Risk Hub, adapting in real-time to accurately identify abnormal behaviour at speed. By marrying the depth of our technology with the breadth of Visa’s reach, we’re excited at what we can achieve together for our customers.”
