Visa Launches Enhanced A2A Protect Innovations to Help Financial Institutions Stop Fraud Before Money Leaves Accounts

SINGAPORE, Sept. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Visa (NYSE: V), a world leader in digital payments, today announced an enhanced version of A2A Protect, delivering real-time risk insights that help banks stop account-to-account fraud before money leaves customer accounts. The expanded solution introduces a new unified fraud score—Visa's first in-market integration of Featurespace technology—giving financial institutions faster, clearer signals to detect more fraud while reducing unnecessary alerts.

In addition, Visa is developing its complementary fraud prevention capabilities through Visa Graph IQ, a graph-powered, agentic investigation capability that provides deeper investigative insights to help financial institutions uncover fraud networks, identify money mule activity, detect emerging threats, and accelerate fraud and risk investigations.

As account-to-account (A2A) payments accelerate globally, A2A transactions are projected to surpass 5.8 trillion by 2028, a 160% increase from 2024, with Asia Pacific expected to account for more than half of global A2A consumer transactions by 2028[1]. While this growth presents significant opportunities, it also creates new fraud risks. Asia Pacific accounts for an estimated 67% of the world's USD 1.03 trillion in annual scam losses, with Asia alone recording USD 688.42 billion in scam-related losses in 2024[2]. This growing threat is driving increased regulatory and industry focus on strengthening fraud prevention capabilities and enhancing consumer protection.

A2A Protect leverages advanced AI and sophisticated transfer learning and gives banks immediate access to critical global risk insights on A2A transactions, without waiting months for models to develop intelligence from a bank's own transaction data, and without having to wait for other banks to join a consortium, delivering results and value from day one. Banks that opt in can incorporate additional network-level signals to enhance detection of emerging threats operating across the ecosystem.

"As account-to-account payments continue to accelerate across Asia Pacific, financial institutions are looking for ways to grow digital payments with confidence while maintaining a seamless experience for consumers and businesses," said Serene Gay, Head of Value-Added Services, Asia Pacific at Visa. "The latest enhancements to A2A Protect combine Visa's network intelligence with advanced AI capabilities to help our clients detect fraud earlier, respond faster to emerging threats, and strengthen trust in the digital payments ecosystem."

For financial institutions that opt into network level intelligence sharing, A2A Protect highlights emerging scam hotspots and coordinated fraud activity – insights that may be difficult for individual financial institutions to detect alone, and that help the wider ecosystem respond faster to new threats. This gives financial institutions an earlier and more complete view of risk, helping to identify scams before authorisation. In fact, Visa A2A Protect has been shown to increase fraud detection by up to 75% in the first six months of deployment.

A2A Protect integrates with financial institutions' current systems through a single API, reducing implementation time and complexity. Each alert includes a plain language explanation of why a transaction was flagged, helping fraud teams act quickly and confidently without disrupting genuine customers.

For more information on how Visa works to prevent fraud across the ecosystem, visit Visa.com/security.

About Visa Inc.
Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at Visa.com.