Visa, a global leader in digital payments, announced an enhanced version of A2A Protect designed to deliver 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, described as Visa’s first in-market integration of Featurespace technology, giving financial institutions faster and clearer signals to detect more fraud while reducing unnecessary alerts.

As account-to-account (A2A) payments accelerate globally, A2A transactions are projected to surpass 5.8 trillion by 2028, a 160% increase from 2024. That growth has made speed a central issue for fraud teams, since A2A transfers can move funds quickly and leave a narrow window to intervene. A2A Protect uses advanced AI and sophisticated transfer learning to give banks immediate access to global risk insights on A2A transactions, without waiting months for models to learn from a bank’s own transaction data and without waiting for other banks to join a consortium. Visa said this approach is intended to deliver results and value from day one. Banks that opt in can also incorporate additional network-level signals to improve detection of emerging threats across the ecosystem.

“Fraudsters move fast across payment types, and financial institutions need risk insights just as quickly, without slowing down legitimate payments,” said James Mirfin, Head of Risk and Security Solutions at Visa. “A2A Protect combines Visa’s network expertise with Featurespace’s technology to deliver a powerful new layer of protection that helps financial institutions detect more fraud, earlier.”

For financial institutions that choose to participate in network-level intelligence sharing, A2A Protect highlights emerging scam hotspots and coordinated fraud activity. Visa said these are insights that may be difficult for individual financial institutions to detect on their own and that can help the wider ecosystem respond faster to new threats. The company said this provides a more complete and early view of risk, helping identify scams before authorization. Visa added that A2A Protect has been shown to increase fraud detection by 75% in the first six months of deployment.

The solution integrates with financial institutions’ current systems through a single API, which Visa said reduces 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.

A2A Protect has also been shown to reduce over 50% more fraud and help reduce over 40% in unnecessary fraud alerts.