SAN FRANCISCO — The $29 billion Navy Federal Credit Union has one of the best credit card programs in the country when it comes to protecting its cardholders from credit card fraud, according to a recent research report from a noted card firm.
Javelin research prepared the 2007 Card Issuers' Identity Safety Scorecard, a report which listed Navy Federal's Platinum MasterCard program as fifth in the entire credit card industry for card protection, a designation it shared with Bank of America's Visa Platinum card, the Blue card from American Express, the Discover Platinum card from Discover and First National Bank of Omaha's Platinum Edition Visa (these two tied for third on the list), and Citibank's Citi Platinum Select.
"Card issuers have a golden opportunity to increase loyalty and retention, and strengthen relationships and their brand reputation, by giving consumers simple identity fraud prevention tools they like to use," said James Van Dyke, president of Javelin Strategy & Research in a prepared statement announcing the report. "Identity fraud is a major pain point for consumers and can damage the relationship between the consumer and the card issuer."
Recommended For You
Javelin did not reveal what criteria helped add Navy to the list but Debbie Calder, Navy's vice president for consumer and credit card lending credited the CU's education of its members and processing with TSYS as reasons for the rating.
"We do a great deal to educate our members about their fraud risk and about how they can help us to protect them," Calder explained. "TSYS helps us because it has a open architecture card platform which allows us to make the quick adjustments and changes that we sometimes need to make," she said.
Having a pretty flexible and adaptive fraud program is particularly important for Navy, given that the CU has a credit card portfolio of more than 1.3 million credit cards and 1.5 million debit cards. Keeping the incidence of suspected fraud down to where it, daily, averages only 1.2% is a particular challenge as well given that so many of the credit union's card holders, on any given day, may be using their card overseas.
The credit union doesn't have the option of simply blocking a country because a transaction from that country may be fraudulent, Calder says. Instead the credit union relies on the help from TSYS neural network, dubbed CardGuard and on its members to come up with card security strategies.
"Increasingly our members are letting us when they are going overseas so that we can build that into our card fraud protection strategy," Calder said. She also stressed that even though the credit union's Platinum MasterCard program was the one that Javelin recognized, all the credit union's card programs, which carry both the Visa and MasterCard brand, share the same protection structure.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
