Visor combines Fair Isaac's Falcon Fraud Manager system and Fraud Predictor with Merchant Profiles product with the VisaNet processing system. The system analyses card transactions to deliver a risk score by monitoring the spending behaviour of each cardholder along with the profile of each merchant.

Each time a transaction passes through VisaNet it is automatically routed to Visor where Fair Isaac's technology is used to monitor spending patterns for each account to detect suspicious transactions. The system also analyses the individual merchant profile, including its category and location and information on any previous fraudulent activity. Regional, country or bank specific fraud detection rules are also applied.

Visor generates a score for each transaction and the higher the score, the higher the probability of fraud. If the score exceeds the threshold set up by the bank, an alert is delivered to relevent bank staff.

Banks can also see details of other transactions relating to that account over the past seven days. The bank then verifies if the transaction is fraudulent and feeds the results back into Visor.

Prior to launch, the product was piloted at Barclays Bank International in Germany, ICS in the Netherlands and Nationwide in the UK. The system has now gone live to a number of other banks and a full roll-out is planned from January 2004.

John Chaplin, executive vice president, Visa EU, says: "Early pilots indicate that members are seeing an increase of anywhere between 15 to 60 per cent in fraud detection rates, depending on the number of transactions scrutinised. These immediate short term results confirm that Visor will be a powerful tool for our member banks' to combat their exposure to fraud."

Martin Salter, team manager, fraud detection, Nationwide, says Visor has two significant improvements over CRIS: "Firstly, all the transactions can be viewed, not just those that score above the threshold. This enables an analyst to view the high scoring transactions in the context of the recent activity on the account – and make a more informed decision. Secondly, the use of rules allows you to create cases for a particular merchant, merchant type or country that is specifically affecting you as an issuer."

Visa says the Visor system is easy to implement as there are no hardware costs and no systems integration requirements. Visor can be used as standalone system or integrated with existing fraud management applications.

The product will replace Visa EU's existing fraud detection system CRIS Online 2, which will be phased out by the end of March 2004.