Payments technology provider Verifone has deployed Featurespace, a Visa solution, within its anti-fraud framework. The platform, which uses adaptive machine learning models, is now enabled across Verifone's payment gateways. It assesses each payment in real time to help merchants and payment facilitators reduce fraud losses, declined legitimate sales, and chargebacks.
Scoring every transaction in real time
Verifone's risk scoring framework evaluates more than 1,800 attributes of each transaction in real time, while keeping processing time under 100 milliseconds. Using Visa's Adaptive Behavioral Analytics, it builds a profile of normal behaviour for each merchant, card, and account, so that a purchase can be assessed against how that merchant usually trades. The framework looks beyond individual transactions to capture patterns that appear only when signals are combined, and is designed to learn from them over time.
Fraud screening, compliance, and anti-money laundering detection are built into the payment flow on Verifone's gateways, covering in-store, online, and mobile transactions. Merchants can therefore access fraud protection without adding a separate vendor or integration, and the framework adapts as new fraud patterns emerge. According to Verifone, the framework draws on the scale of its business, which it says processes USD 8 trillion in transactions a year, and on Visa analytics designed for large payment environments.
Fraud losses and declined legitimate sales
Verifone says fraud costs merchants in two ways: through direct losses, including the cost of handling chargebacks, which can affect a merchant's standing with card networks, and through legitimate payments declined at checkout. The company says AI has given more people access to advanced fraud techniques, causing fraud patterns to change faster than in the past.
Fabian Ganster, Head of Global Fraud and Tooling at Verifone, said fraud is increasingly shaped by AI, so defences must be too. He added that combining Visa's adaptive intelligence with Verifone's payments expertise allows the company to respond to threats that change daily and to offer merchants and partners payments and protection from one provider. Visa completed its acquisition of UK-based Featurespace in December 2024.
