In an interview with Internet Retailer, Brad Nightengale, who heads Visa USA’s department of emerging products, says the firm is exploring the possibility of introducing software that would rate the risk level of a particular cardholder transaction at the point of check-out. Transactions considered high-risk could then be refused by card issuers unless the cardholder signed up for the VbV password-based authentication programme.

Visa and MasterCard have spent the past two years building a critical mass of card issuers and merchant-accepting locations for their online authentication programmes. Visa reported a 200% increase in online transactions using Verified by Visa authentication technology for the quarter ending September 2004, compared to the same period last year. In addition, total VbV card volume for the first nine months of 2004 was $5.4 billion.

Separately, Visa is facing a patent infringement lawsuit lodged by starpay and Vimachine over the payment authentication technology. Earlier this week, US courts rejected only four of the 28 claims lodged against Visa by the companies, a ruling which starpay welcomed as positive.

Marc Messner, president of starpay, states: "We believe we are well positioned to move the case toward trial."