The company fends off half a billion cyberattacks a month.
03/27/2024 1:45 P.M.
2 minute read
Visa is doubling down on its cybersecurity investments, allocating billions to fortify its defenses and develop cutting-edge services through artificial intelligence, CEO Ryan McInerney said at an investor conference last week, a Payments Dive article reported.
“Cybersecurity is a huge topic for any company around the planet, especially for financial services firms, and especially for us as a platform for banks around the world, and as you might imagine, we’re a huge attack vector,” McInerney told attendees at the RBC Capital Markets conference on March 5.
McInerney reported that the company fends off about a half billion attacks on its perimeter on a monthly basis, ranging from average phishing emails to sophisticated nation-state-backed cyber assaults.
The company’s San Francisco headquarters serves as a hub for defending against a spectrum of threats. He said about 1,000 of the company’s 30,000 worldwide workers are “only working on cyber.”
“We’ve spent billions of dollars, we’ll spend billions of dollars protecting the network of networks that we built on behalf of our clients and the ecosystem,” McInerney said, adding that Visa is also “increasingly productizing” its cyber know-how to sell both additional network services and consulting services to customers, according to the article.
Government entities are actively seeking to reduce card network fees, prompting industry players like Visa to underscore the vital role these fees play in funding cybersecurity efforts. Visa contends that any reduction in fees could potentially compromise the company’s ability to combat cyber threats effectively.
“Those government efforts include the Federal Reserve’s proposal last year to lower the amount that card networks can charge merchants for processing debit card transactions. They also include the bipartisan effort in Congress to pass the proposed Credit Card Competition Act, which aims to reduce such fees by injecting more competition into the processing of credit transactions,” according to the Payments Dive article.
McInerney also stressed the importance of knowledge sharing, emphasizing how insights gleaned from cyber threats in one region can inform and benefit clients in another. Through collaborative efforts and information exchange, Visa seeks to empower its global clientele to stay ahead of emerging threats.
The company employs advanced technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, leveraging its vast repository of global payment data to develop sophisticated fraud detection mechanisms. By harnessing the power of AI, Visa aims to thwart account-to-account fraud, ensuring the integrity of transactions across various payment ecosystems worldwide.
“What powers generative AI is data,” McInerney said, adding that Visa has “arguably the largest global payments data set that exists.”
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