Visa Unveils More Powerful AI Tool That Approves or Denies Card Transactions (wsj.com) 50
Visa said it has developed a more advanced artificial intelligence system that can approve or decline credit and debit transactions on behalf of banks whose own networks are down. From a report: The decision to approve or deny a transaction typically is made by the bank. But bank networks can crash because of natural disasters, buggy software or other reasons. Visa said its backup system will be available to banks who sign up for the service starting in October. The technology is "an incredible first step in helping us reduce the impact of an outage," said Rajat Taneja, president of technology for Visa. The financial services company is the largest U.S. card network, as measured both by the number of cards in circulation and by transactions. The new service reflects the growing use of AI in banking. Banks are expected to spend $7.1 billion on AI in 2020, growing to $14.5 billion by 2024, on initiatives such as fraud analysis and investigation, according to market research firm International Data Corp. The service, Smarter Stand-In Processing, uses a branch of AI called deep learning that roughly mimics neurons in the human brain and is an underlying technology powering self-driving cars, voice-enabled digital assistants and facial recognition.
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There will be no bugs (Score:5, Funny)
nothing will go wrong
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The cost will be eaten by the banks or the vendors, not by Visa. So who cares?
Re: There will be no bugs (Score:2)
You've never seen a bank before? Ever?
They're the kind of assholes who bill you for billing you. ... to give them money.
It literally costs money,
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If you're in the UK I recommend Nationwide Building Society, 1st time I went in the red with them, unauthorised, they charged me 2p. And they were a lot easier to open an account with the most high street banks.
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It is AI, i.e. "magic"! Anything lesser intelligences (like you or me) would perceive as bug is obviously a feature and we just lack the insight to see that.
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And? Are you saying people are bug free? Or the current heuristics based system is bug free?
Your goal of perfection is irrelevant. Anything is better than nothing, which is precisely the system it hopes to combat: one that has completely failed.
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There are already bugs. The new system doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to be better.
In the last 20 years or so, I've had to call the bank at least a half dozen times to get my cards re-enabled after "suspicious" transactions, not to mention an uncountable number of other times I've gotten text messages or app notifications effectively asking if "your wife visited a new store in your hometown and then the same gas station she always does" is legitimate activity. Twice I've had my card disabled when
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"In the last 20 years or so, I've had to call the bank at least a half dozen times to get my cards re-enabled after "suspicious" transactions,"
Exactly! I live in Europe and each an every time when I buy a bottle of booze in the airport, then fly an hour to Barcelona, Nice, Copenhagen or wherever and buy something there, the morons think it's a fraud, because nobody can be in a different country after an hour or 2.
Next we'll have to tell them all our travel plans.
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Next we'll have to tell them all our travel plans.
That's literally what I did in the two cases I mentioned. Didn't help. They still disabled my card.
At least here in the States we don't get abroad too often, simply because of the difficulty in doing so (e.g. when you live in a state that's 20% bigger than France [mylifeelsewhere.com] and a country that's big enough to span from Glasgow to Baghdad [mylifeelsewhere.com], traveling internationally isn't something that's undertaken easily or lightly; even the nearest international airport is 2 hours away, or I could hit the Mexican border in about 6 hou
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I think you're right.
Unlike the social media companies, where if they target you it gets downplayed as being a 'mistake', the credit card cartel doesn't seem to answer to anybody.
Oh crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Expect more tense calls to the customer service, while standing next to the payment terminal, with the line behind you giving you a stinkeye.
Re:Oh crap (Score:5, Informative)
-Should have paid cash.
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No, it will be used for other situations and become a pain in the ass. Screenshot this.
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I am surprised credit cards don't already do this.
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I am not surprised. Having you in debt beyond your income means they get a permanent income stream as you struggle to pay the interest but never make it to the principle. Rather than being something to stop, it's something they typically actively encourage.
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This already happens. A few years back, my wife was literally denied payment for her grocery cart filled with food at the very same store she shops at every single week, just because we did our once every five years big household goods shopping in mall across the street ten days before. Talk about closing the door after the horse has left the barn.
The question is whether the system returns false negatives significantly more often than in the past. New systems already tend to have glitches.
Great, more crap... (Score:4, Informative)
I did buy some Kindle books at Amazon at around 3:00AM last week. That, and a card number verification (can be done with a _guess_ at the card number apparently...) at Facebook (where I most decidedly have no account and any data they may have pertaining to me is a criminal act on their side under the GDPR) was enough to get my card blocked. And it was obvious these were for the Kindle, i.e. can only go to me anyways. And it was like $10.
Well, at least the helpline was fast and I get a new card for free. They could not tell me what that Facebook thing was about. Things seem to be pretty broken and this sounds like it will just get even more bizarre.
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Things seem to be pretty broken
You just described some nefarious activity at Facebook that neither you nor the credit card company can explain. Getting your card blocked as a result doesn't sound like it's broken, it sounds like it's working 100% as intended. And you should be thankful for that too. Card fraud often is started with a tiny barely noticeable transaction to test the card before they attempt to empty out your account. I hope you thanked the guys at the bank.
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Things seem to be pretty broken
You just described some nefarious activity at Facebook that neither you nor the credit card company can explain. Getting your card blocked as a result doesn't sound like it's broken, it sounds like it's working 100% as intended. And you should be thankful for that too. Card fraud often is started with a tiny barely noticeable transaction to test the card before they attempt to empty out your account. I hope you thanked the guys at the bank.
According to the agent, it was a combination of these two acts. The "nefarious" action alone would have done nothing. You cannot use my card online without a real-time confirmation via text message. You cannot use it without the CVV code. You cannot use it without my address. But apparently, you can verify the number at Facebook without all that. So no.
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That is the definition of suspicious activity.
That's what thieves do - they steal credit card numbers and attempt a bunch of transactions. If your card requi
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You seem to be unaware how anomaly detection works. _Anything_ is suspicious, including no activity. The question is what its score is. As this required the combined score of both activities, one of the scores is badly broken.
Untraceable denying. Now institutionalized! (Score:2)
Instead of rules that let you fix whatever displeases them, they now use literally vague judgment that may be here, today, and over there, tomorrow.
Just like abusive parents, bosses or cops in a dictatorship.
Just freakin great.
Good that I don't have to use credit cards here in Germany, where only cash is considered true money, and always will be.
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“Print”?!
They just go into their excel spreadsheet and add a 0 these days.
Why do you need "AI" to clear a transaction? (Score:2)
if (user.is_card_active())
if (transaction.amount user.get_credit_limit())
if(user.is_typical_location(transaction.location) AND user.is_typical_purchase(transaction.purchase_type))
return true;
Sure, you can bake that into a table as well - but that doesn't make it "AI"
You can add weights and scoring to various condition checks and determine a tran
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Holy crap you have an incredibly simplistic view of how your credit transactions are approved. You're missing many analysis, verification and heuristics steps in the process.
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Your algorithm will reject all my transactions if I finally go on that long vacation in a place I have never been to. How does the user add to the "white list" for is_typical_location()?
Whether it is AI or not, the algorithm has to be capable of learning and be capable of not giving too many false negatives when I do something slightly unusual.
What makes it AI? (Score:2)
Is this 'advanced AI' anything more than a marketing claim?
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Why wouldn't it be? Replacing heuristics based systems is quite typically done with trained algorithms which are called "AI". Just because you don't think it's "AI" until it says "I'm sorry schwit1, I can't do that", doesn't mean it isn't actually AI.
Seriously a high-schooler can setup AI algorithms these days. Define a problem, train a nerual network to solve it by feeding it lots of examples, and you can happily and legitimately slap the word AI on the end of it's name.
Here's where bias in AI is important (Score:3)
Sucks for cashless people (Score:2)
Bank cards are broken (Score:2)
My bank (TD Canada Trust) has been using it for years, it seems. Whenever I try to use my card for anything but a purchase at the local grocery store, it gets blocked. I have explained the bank ten times over that I travel and I shop online. My fraud track record is nil. That helped very little.
Bank cards are an obsolete, untenable technology. We need something else that reliably works.
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Have you considered the possibility that it's you or them rather than bank cards in general? I have had no problems at all with a variety of cards. I have never had any card blocked for a false positive but I have had fraudulent charges blocked very quickly on a variety of different cards.
I have on occasion (not very frequently) received the automated call that reads off a series of transactions and asks me to confirm whether I made each one. Depending on my responses, the automated system either says "than
Just one step away from (Score:1)
Or spend money going after offenders (Score:2)
If there was the slightest possibility of repercussions for CC number theft perhaps the rates of these crimes would be reduced.
My case involved my card being used at a valet parking stand in Los Angeles (100's of miles away from me) to charge up $150 in $30 increments.
How hard is it to send the local PD over there and see who was working the stand at 11:45p that night? Poke around a bit. The response is invariably 'we have to focus on more serious crimes' but are there really that many murders, assaults,
Insurance (Score:2)
Machine learning (Score:1)