Visa International will outline new security measures to protect customer data held by merchants and processors at a special summit to be held in Sydney Monday, October 24, 2005.
The summit includes representatives from the banking, retail, government, law enforcement and IT industries.
Visa International general manager Bruce Mansfield and Cybertrust incident response vice president Brian Sartin will also be there.
In addition to data protection, the summit will address the Visa Account Information Security Standard, progress on the implementation of smart cards and ways to fight fraud.
Sartin will talk on the leading causes of information theft in the retail industry, as well as the causes behind the increase of reported security breaches worldwide.
The conference is being held at the Four Seasons Hotel, George St, Sydney, starting 9am.
Earlier this year in a bid to reduce credit card fraud, Visa USA launched a security tool that lets merchants instantly check transactions in stores or online, so they can identify fraud before a transaction is completed.
The credit card company said its new "advanced authorization" system is expected to help prevent an estimated $US164 million in fraud-related losses over the next five years. Jean Bruesewitz, a senior vice president of processing and emerging products for the company, said advanced authorization adds 10 bytes of additional information to the data sent to card-issuing banks and card-processing companies after a credit card is used. That new information provides a vertical view of the previous and existing spending patterns on the card account and a horizontal look at transactions occurring in real-time across the credit card network.
The new tool has been in testing for 12 months and some credit card issuers and card transaction processors are already able to use the extra 10 bytes of advanced authorization data in their systems, Bruesewitz said. Visa USA hopes to have the tool fully deployed by banks and card processors within a year, she said.
Today, credit card fraud accounts for five cents of every $100 in transactions. Visa believes that advanced authorization could reduce that to three cents per $100 in transactions, Bruesewitz said.