Mastercard has announced the launch of its Mastercard A2A Protect tool, aimed at safeguarding consumers and providing appropriate protection against fraudsters.
Following this announcement, by combining fraud prevention technology with a clear dispute resolution framework, the new Mastercard A2A Protect was developed in order to give banks the possibility to offer customers the appropriate levels of protection against fraudsters.
At the moment, Mastercard A2A Protect is expected to initially focus on the most acute needs, such as Authorised Push Payment fraud, providing a combination of preventative measures, consumer protections, and the overall process to recover funds. Subsequent phases are set to establish a process for recovering funds across a broader range of scenarios, including where products and services have been paid for.
More information on the Mastercard A2A Protect launch
According to the official press release, the solution intends to support participating bank clients before, during, and after each transaction that is made. This will take place by preventing fraud, focusing on improving CFR’s payment scoring capabilities, helping identify more high-risk transactions, complementing banks’ own efforts, leveraging Trace to prevent ML, financial crime, and support banks to idenfy or close `mule` accounts, as well as delivering a standardised fraud and loss reporting mechanism, which will enable banks to access improved fraud insights.
At the same time, the new solution will prioritise the process of protecting customers and offering banks a simple framework, as well as a comprehensive set of multilateral standards to drive best practice and safeguard clients. By introducing a uniform procedure for banks and financial institutions to resolve disputes and recover funds across multiple use cases via Mastercard’s existing centralised platform, Mastercard A2A Protect will also focus on reducing costs and speeding up resolution.
Furthermore, Monzo, NatWest, and Santander are collaborating with Mastercard in order to develop and deploy the service across UK Faster Payments, later in 2025.
