21 Jul 2009
Visa Europe is trialling an SMS transaction alert service for cardholders in an attempt to step up card security.
Using the service, Visa credit card holders can instantly receive on their mobile the time, location and amount of each transaction.
Cardholders can choose to have the updates delivered via text message, mobile email or to applications running on smartphones such as the iPhone or Android-based devices.
The alerts are being tested with Visa staff in the UK and its network of member banks, and the service will be made available to consumers if the trial is successful – in which case, future developments could include instant conversion into the user’s home currency while abroad.
According to Sandra Alzetta, senior vice president of innovation and new product development at Visa Europe, the service will allow consumers to be in constant control of their card activity.
“We want to offer cardholders the reassurance of knowing, in real-time, exactly where and when their card is being used. If something looks suspicious, this will give them the power to put a stop to any fraud taking place on their cards,” she said.
“We have chosen the summer holiday season to test this proposition as it’s 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."
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 organisation's 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
Posted by: Peter Tanner 06 Aug 2009
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