Visa Announces System to Help Consumers Monitor and Control Cards

Visa introduces a new service to help consumers monitor and control how, where, and when their Visa cards can be used, including credit, debit, and prepaid cards. It’s called Visa Consumer Transaction Controls.

Press Release

Here are the key controls that they service offers:

• Temporarily stop transaction approvals – allows consumers to freeze their card instantly if it was stolen or misplaced. This is similar to Discover’s ‘Freeze It’ feature, and BBVA added this feature to their app as well.
• Manage specific transaction types – Consumers can selectively choose card activities to block or to get alerts. This includes online purchases, store purchases, international purchases, or ATM transactions.
• Set spending limits – Account holders can limit transaction size, set spending limits over a period of time, or receive spending alerts based on transaction amount.
• Manage multiple cards – Families or businesses can create controls or alerts for primary cards as well as authorized-user that are given to family members or employees. For example, a parent can share a Visa account with a child by providing an authorized-user card with spending limits and transaction alerts that are sent to the parent’s mobile device.

This system created by Visa is made for financial institutions, not for the individual. The idea is that banks will be able to use it to allow their customers these added controls via their app or website.

Which leads to the question of how useful this will be for banks who have cards from others issuers (Mastercard, Amex) in their portfolio as well, including most large banks. Possibly this system is intended more the smaller ones, and the bigger banks will develop their own system if they want to offer similar controls.

Overall some nice stuff here. People get the ability to freeze their card while looking for a misplaced card, and useful for authorized-user cards with employees and families. It’ll also be cool if prepaid Visa gift cards get these controls as we’ve often seen fraud on those cards and they are harder to get refunded.

We’ll have to see which banks adopt the system.