Visa offers Azerbaijan new card security solution

By Azernews

By Rashid Shirinov

Visa is ready to offer Azerbaijan a new solution to improve security and fight against hacking and fraud, Larisa Makarova, Director of Visa’s Risk Management Operations in the CIS and South-Eastern Europe, told Trend on May 28.

She noted that today Visa, along with traditional tools, presents a new solution that is just entering the CIS market.

“This is tokenization – when the card number does not appear in the transaction in order to prevent potential hacking. Even if the hacking happens, the fraudsters who received the token instead of the card number, cannot do anything with it,” Makarova said.

Speaking about the principles of the new tool, the director noted that each card is linked to several tokens, depending on the number of devices through which one can make payment.

It can be a contactless payment by card, as well as payments by phone, rings, glasses and so on. A token is attached to each device, that is, one card can have several tokens, Makarova said.

“If there is a compromise of any token, then firstly the fraudster cannot do anything with it, and secondly the issuer knows where the compromise occurred, and it is very easy to investigate which merchant or processing center has had it,” she added.

VISA is a global payment system that provides fast, secure and reliable electronic payment network to cardholders, merchants, financial and governmental institutions around the world. The company was founded in 1958 in California, U.S. Currently, almost all Azerbaijani banks work with VISA.

Digitalization of the banking sector in Azerbaijan is one of the priorities in the country's strategic roadmap for the development of the financial market. Non-cash transactions of banks in Azerbaijan amounted to $4.8 billion in the first quarter of 2018, which is 11.2 percent more than in January-March 2017.