Visa, a global leader in payments, has expanded its global value-added services portfolio with the addition of ARIC Risk Hub, a cutting-edge fraud prevention platform designed to help protect banks, acquirers, and financial institutions against a broad spectrum of fraud and financial crime.

Powered by Visa’s recent acquisition, Featurespace, the ARIC Risk Hub leverages adaptive AI to build profiles around genuine customer activity, maximising approvals and stopping bad actors in real time.

A groundbreaking partnership with Eika Gruppen, an alliance of 46 local banks in Norway, has shown how utilising the latest AI technology has the potential to cut drastically the billions lost to fraud and scams every year. Following the implementation of the ARIC Risk Hub, Eika Gruppen saw a significant decrease in successful fraud attempts across its customer base, with a 90% reduction in phishing losses in 2024 vs 2023.

Antony Cahill, President of Value-Added Services at Visa, emphasised the importance of integrating new technologies to enhance payment security: "Accepting a payment is a fundamental need of any business. Leveraging new technology to accept payments more efficiently and securely can be what sets a business apart in today’s rapidly digitalising world. With our new services, we’re helping businesses harness data-driven insights, simplify the checkout experience, and fight fraud more effectively than ever.”

Tareq Muhmood, Head of Value-Added Services, Europe at Visa, commented: "We are thrilled to be integrating ARIC Risk Hub into our offer to businesses and financial institutions. We have been using AI for over 30 years to fight fraud, and now by integrating behavioural data with ARIC’s cutting-edge technology we will further help our clients to stay ahead of emerging threats.”

Featurespace’s ARIC Risk Hub, a Visa solution, is available globally today, offering businesses a powerful tool to help combat fraud and protect their customers.

Tim Vanderham, Chief Operating Officer at Featurespace, said: “Born out of Cambridge University 15 years ago, Featurespace’s mission is to help businesses make the world a safer place to transact. We enable our customers to access the latest technology in fraud prevention through the ARIC Risk Hub, adapting in real-time to accurately identify abnormal behaviour at speed. By marrying the depth of our technology with the breadth of Visa’s reach, we’re excited at what we can achieve together for our customers.”

Leveraging AI to power growth

Eika faced three key challenges when it came to fraud prevention:

• Increasing fraud rates: Banks across Norway have experienced a surge in fraud attempts in recent years, particularly in the form of phishing attacks that target elderly customers.
• Complex fraud patterns: The sophisticated attacks by fraudsters made identifying and preventing attacks using existing systems increasingly difficult.
• Manual review limitations: With the increasing volume of payments, manual reviews were placing unsustainable demands on time and resource, as well as increasing the likelihood of accidental error.

There was a pressing need for a new fraud solution that was not only effective at detecting threats but also streamlined for operational efficiency and automated to reduce manual workload.

ARIC Risk Hub was implemented to learn the behaviour patterns of Eika customers and establish a ‘normal’ baseline, meaning that, when live, the technology could more accurately flag suspicious behaviour in real-time with minimal false positives.

ARIC is used to assess the risk of every payment initiated via online or mobile banking services. Each payment is evaluated by its technology in real time to determine whether it’s genuine. If the payment is deemed to be suspicious, ARIC will tell the bank to stop the payment and flag it as suspicious so it can be investigated further.

Jon Hagen, Chief Architect at Eika Gruppen, said: “Featurespace’s unique AI-powered technology learns and adapts in real-time, and profiles normal user behaviour in an efficient manner. As fraud patterns evolve, we will need to add more rules and maybe adjust some of the old ones. Adjustment of the rules is easy, given the powerful support of the Featurespace system”.