PARIS, France, June 30. Visa is launching a new platform, the Visa Threat Intelligence Platform (VTIP), Visa’s Regional President for the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEMEA) region, Tareq Muhmood said, Trend's special correspondent reports from the event.

He made the announcement during an information session at the Visa Payments Forum in Paris

“This is a system that allows us to analyze customers’ digital environments and identify threats at an early stage,” he said.

Muhmood stated that the level of fraud in the digital payments industry is showing significant growth and goes beyond traditional account hacking schemes.

According to him, the nature of fraud has changed in recent years: instead of classic attacks on accounts, social engineering and identity theft schemes are increasingly being used.

“If we’re talking solely about fraud risks, the level of fraud in our industry is rising significantly. But this is no longer the traditional fraud we’re used to thinking about when accounts are hacked,” Muhmood noted.

He cited data showing that between June and December of last year, the volume of fraud linked to scams and identity theft reached approximately 1 billion euros.

“We saw about one billion euros in scam-related fraud, where someone impersonates another person or steals their identity,” he emphasized.

According to Muhmood, the development of artificial intelligence could further accelerate the spread of such schemes and make them harder to detect.

“With the advent of AI, this will become even easier. The risk environment is changing very rapidly and has already gone beyond the traditional risk landscape,” he noted.

In response to these challenges, Visa is developing a suite of solutions under the Visa Protect brand, which aims to protect not only individual transactions but also the entire payment ecosystem.

Muhmood pointed out that one of the key problems with existing solutions is delayed response to incidents and a lack of structured data for analysis.

“Many clients receive data that is too general and often learn about a problem too late, when attackers have already had time to scale up their activities,” he said.

He noted that VTIP enables a shift from a reactive model to a proactive one by identifying threats before they can scale up.

According to him, this suite of solutions enables Visa and its partners to detect anomalies more effectively and strengthen the protection of the payment infrastructure in the face of rapidly evolving threats.