Visa is an association of 21,000 member banks that have issued over 1 billion cards worldwide. Over $2 trillion in volume passes through Visa. Although e-commerce has become a significant source of Visa volume growth, there is a downside. Higher fraud levels have resulted, due to an inability to definitively verify identity and account authority over the Internet. Visa needed to find a way to verify cardholder identity for Internet transactions, and engaged Weinstein Consulting to meet these objectives.

Weinstein assisted in the development of Verified by Visa, a new global service that authenticates cardholders during e-commerce transactions. Weinstein:

• Helped develop the specification, service description, message flows, pilot architecture, and implementation requirements for banks, merchants, and their software vendors and service providers.
• Performed competitive analysis of other secure payment initiatives from American Express, MasterCard, NACHA, NYCE, and VeriSign.
• Researched and reported on the economics associated with cardholder disputes and fraud for Internet payment card transactions.
• Selected vendor to verify consumer identities during initial registration.

Verified by Visa will significantly reduce e-commerce payment card fraud, a $1 billion problem worldwide. Global deployment is expected to grow in 2003.