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Visa Trials Instant Alerts Service
Visa Europe has
embarked on a trial of a new mobile service that sends instant
confirmation of a card transaction to the cardholders mobile when they
use their debit, credit, or prepaid card. The notifications provide
increased peace of mind by instantly sending the time, location and
amount of each transaction to the handset. Consumers will be able to
choose to receive the alert via an SMS or email on any mobile device,
or to an application downloaded to a Smartphone.
Visa
is currently trialling the real-time alert service with its staff in
the UK and working closely with member banks through which it will make
the technology available to consumers.
With Visas mobile alert
service, we want to offer cardholders the reassurance of knowing, in
real-time, exactly where and when their card is being used, says
Sandra Alzetta, Senior Vice President of Innovation and New Product
Development at Visa Europe. 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 its 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 Visas solution unique.
Visa
says that in the future, cardholders may be able to customise the
format and content of alerts to fit their individual needs. For
example, instant conversion into the users home currency while abroad
will make it easier to keep on top of budgets.
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Comments
Organisations in the
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 organisations 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
This service is starting to
This service is starting to heat up as banks are realizing that empowering the cardholder into the process of the card approval through a secure media like the cell phone has an instant benefit to them and the cardholder. The product is not new and is available through a Florida based company named Charge Notification Services Corp. that payment and fraus industry experts stated some time ago. One of their executives has extensive experience in Russia where this is available by almost all banks. They actually have a patented process for this. I know because they pitch this to me and it made good sense.