Visa has launched an enhanced version of its A2A Protect solution to help financial institutions detect and stop account-to-account (A2A) fraud in real time before money leaves customers’ accounts.

The upgraded solution introduces a new unified fraud score, marking Visa’s first in-market integration of technology from Featurespace following its acquisition by the global payments company.

Visa said the enhanced A2A Protect has demonstrated the ability to reduce more than 50% additional fraud while cutting unnecessary fraud alerts by more than 40%.

The company said the solution comes as A2A payments continue to expand globally, with A2A transactions projected to surpass 5.8 trillion by 2028, representing a 160% increase from 2024.

A2A Protect uses advanced artificial intelligence and transfer learning to provide banks with immediate access to global risk insights on A2A transactions.

According to Visa, this allows financial institutions to detect emerging threats without waiting months for their own transaction data to generate sufficient intelligence or for other banks to join a fraud-sharing consortium.

Financial institutions that opt into network-level intelligence sharing can also access additional signals designed to identify emerging scam hotspots and coordinated fraud activity across the payments ecosystem.

Visa said these insights can help banks identify risks that may be difficult to detect from their own data alone and respond more quickly to new fraud threats before transactions are authorised.

“Fraudsters move fast across payment types, and financial institutions need risk insights just as quickly, without slowing down legitimate payments,” said Walter Lironi, Senior Vice President and Head of Value-Added Services, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) 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,” he added.

The solution integrates with financial institutions’ existing systems through a single API, which Visa said helps reduce implementation time and complexity.

Each alert also provides a plain-language explanation of why a transaction was flagged, enabling fraud teams to assess risks quickly while minimising disruption to legitimate customers.