Visa Launches Mobile Location Service to Improve Card Payment Experience When Traveling

One of the World's leader in payments, Visa Inc., has introduced a new mobile service designed to reduce unnecessary purchase declines often triggered when consumers travel outside of their home area. Visa Mobile Location Confirmation uses mobile geo-location information to more reliably predict whether it is the account holder or an unauthorized user making a payment with a Visa account.

“Wherever you are in the world, we want Visa transactions to be the most secure, convenient and seamless payment choice,” said Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk products and business intelligence, Visa Inc said in a release by the company. “By matching the location of the cardholder through a cell phone or other mobile device, to the location of the purchase, Visa’s new service will enable banks to feel more confident about authorizing a transaction that might otherwise have been declined due to suspicion of fraud.”

While infrequent, unnecessary transaction declines can mean lost sales for retailers, additional customer service costs for financial institutions and, ultimately, frustration for the cardholder if unable to make a purchase when traveling. According to Visa estimates, issuing financial institutions spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to manage customer service calls related to pre-travel requests and to research declined transactions.

By providing financial institutions greater intelligence when approving transactions, Visa expects to reduce such declines by as much as 30 percent, impacting millions of transactions annually and improving the experience for cardholders, merchants and financial institutions.


Mobile Location Confirmation is an optional service for consumers that will be offered through participating financial institutions’ mobile banking applications. The service uses mobile geo-location data in real time as an additional input into Visa’s predictive fraud analytics. Finsphere Corporation, a leader in the use of mobile data and geo-spatial analysis, provides Visa an analysis of the account holder’s device location data, which is then matched with the transaction location in less than a millisecond, right at the point of sale. When a cardholder’s mobile device is in the same location as the payment transaction, the issuing financial institution can more confidently approve the transaction.

Available to U.S. card-issuing financial institutions in April 2015, Mobile Location Confirmation is another innovation from Visa designed to provide issuing financial institutions with more information to help protect against fraud while facilitating a better payment experience for consumers.

“Through Visa’s Mobile Location Confirmation service, we’re enabling more precise fraud monitoring, which creates a better payment experience for travelers, assists merchants and reduces unnecessary operational costs for financial institutions,” added Nelsen.