The rapid digitisation of payments across Asia Pacific has transformed how consumers and businesses transact, but it has also reshaped the nature of financial crime. Visa’s Asia Pacific head of value-added services (VAS), Axel Boye-Moller, described the region as a “very dynamic market” where multiple payment methods—from cards to real-time transfers and wallets—create both opportunity and exposure. He observed that the proliferation of channels has enabled what he calls “industrialised deception,” where scams and impersonation schemes exploit scale, automation and increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI). Such threats are no longer isolated but coordinated, often operating across borders and time zones. “Fraud detection is a team sport,” he said, emphasising that no single institution or regulator can counter these risks alone. Visa’s approach centres on multi-layered defence, combining network-level protection with industry collaboration. The company works with regulators, governments and clients to strengthen detection capabilities while continuing to invest in its own cyber-resilience. This integrated model recognises that real-time payments and instant settlement—though popular with consumers—also compress the window for fraud prevention, making AI-driven vigilance essential. By viewing fraud not as an isolated function but as part of a broader trust architecture, Visa’s approach resonates with the broader Singapore Fintech Festival (SFF) 2025 theme of building a technology blueprint for the next decade of finance—where digital growth and systemic resilience must advance together. AI as the foundation of trusted payments AI has long underpinned Visa’s fraud-management systems. Boye-Moller noted that “since the 1990s” the network has provided issuers with real-time fraud scores, allowing them to detect and prevent suspicious transactions before approval. Over three decades, these models have evolved from static rules to adaptive algorithms that learn continuously from millions of transaction patterns. Today, Visa applies AI and machine learning not only to card transactions but also across the expanding digital value chain. With the surge in e-commerce, authentication tools have become crucial to verify the identity of buyers and sellers. Similarly, wallet provisioning—the process of embedding a payment credential into a digital wallet—has emerged as a new fraud vector, prompting Visa to design targeted defences for that moment of vulnerability. The company is also extending its AI analytics beyond its own network, supporting clients that handle multiple payment rails. Boye-Moller said Visa is making a “big push into multi-network, or network-agnostic, solutions,” applying its technology to real-time and account-to-account systems as well. This cross-network capability illustrates how AI can serve as the connective tissue in a fragmented payments landscape, enhancing both security and interoperability. For Visa, AI’s role is not merely reactive; it is foundational. It enables a proactive, data-rich layer of trust that underwrites the future of intelligent payments—where transactions must be instantaneous, accurate and secure. Reducing false declines and optimising merchant acceptance Fraud prevention alone does not ensure commercial success. Merchants also need reliable approval of legitimate transactions to sustain conversion and revenue. Boye-Moller recognised that false declines—genuine payments rejected as fraudulent—remain a costly challenge, particularly in e-commerce where customer drop-off rates are high. Visa’s Decision Manager platform applies AI scoring and data enrichment to help merchants “see both an uplift in their approval rates as well as a fraud reduction” when deployed. The system filters genuine activity from potential fraud, reducing “false positives” that would otherwise block valid customers. For merchants, this translates directly into higher throughput and greater customer satisfaction. These improvements also advance a broader policy goal: inclusion. In many emerging markets, small and medium-sized enterprises depend on cross-border digital payments. Enhanced approval rates and lower fraud losses make participation in formal digital commerce more sustainable. Visa’s merchant-side optimisation tools thus form part of the region’s digital growth infrastructure, aligning operational efficiency with accessibility. Plug-in modularity and the future of system modernisation As digital demands grow, financial institutions face pressure to innovate without dismantling their legacy cores. “A lot of our clients, especially traditional financial institutions, are faced with legacy technology,” Boye-Moller said, noting that they need to accelerate product launches, manage costs and maintain resilience simultaneously. Visa’s modular, application programming interface (API)-first approach allows clients to integrate new capabilities without full-scale replacement. The acquisition of Pismo—a cloud-native, issuer-processing and core-banking platform—has strengthened this model. “Our capabilities are open and modular,” he explained. “You can take the full stack or consume individual services through APIs”. This plug-in flexibility gives banks and fintechs greater control over transformation pace and investment priorities. Institutions can adopt specific components such as fraud monitoring or back-end processing while maintaining existing front-end systems. The model addresses the recurring themes Boye-Moller identified: faster innovation, lower cost and continuous availability. The modular approach also supports interoperability, which will be central to the region’s financial architecture over the next decade. By decoupling services and enabling selective adoption, Visa’s VAS solutions contribute to the kind of open, resilient infrastructure that regulators and policymakers advocate across Asia Pacific. Collaboration, resilience and responsible innovation Trust and security, Boye-Moller said, are “fundamental, even existential” to payments. “For Visa, they are built into the design of every product and service,” he said. This mindset reflects the industry’s shift towards secure-by-design innovation—embedding safeguards from conception rather than adding them after deployment. Collaboration remains essential. Visa works “bilaterally with regulators and governments” and closely with clients, to ensure fraud-management capabilities remain robust and current. This cooperative structure mirrors the festival’s emphasis on shared responsibility for resilience. Operational stability and cybersecurity are no longer viewed as competitive advantages but as collective obligations across the ecosystem. Boye-Moller also highlighted Visa’s continued expansion of its acceptance platform, which already serves many e-commerce merchants and is now extending into card-present commerce. Additionally, pilots such as its partnership with major banks in the United Kingdom to detect fraud on real-time payment rails demonstrate how AI-driven safeguards can be transferred across different payment infrastructures. These initiatives signal a future where risk management, technology and policy evolve in synchrony—an essential condition for a trustworthy digital economy. Building resilience into the next decade of finance Visa’s value-added services exemplify how financial infrastructure is being re-engineered for an AI-enabled era. The company’s efforts to combat “industrialised deception,” enhance merchant acceptance and deliver modular innovation align closely with the technology blueprint for the next decade of finance championed at the SFF 2025. Yet the long-term test lies beyond technical deployment. Sustaining trust in an ecosystem increasingly mediated by AI will require continuous collaboration between networks, regulators and institutions. The capacity to innovate responsibly, maintain operational resilience and uphold inclusion will determine whether the region’s payments transformation fulfils its promise. Boye-Moller’s perspective underscores a critical truth: technology may power the next decade of finance, but trust will define it.
