WASHINGTON —Visa said it has changed its Visa Advanced Authorization program to help credit unions and other card issuers detect fraud more quickly.

The new advances will allow card issuers, including credit unions, to more reliably know which transactions to decline in real time, potentially reducing fraud by billions per year, while more confidently approving legitimate transactions to remove friction from payments for merchants and consumers alike, Visa said.

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“Cardholders, merchants and issuers all want to have confidence in the convenience and the security of every Visa transaction,” Mark Nelsen, head of Risk and Authentication Products, told the card brand's Global Security Summit on Wednesday.

“The great improvements we've made in Advanced Authorization this year were designed to do just that: fight fraud and its costs to financial institutions and merchants, while also ensuring legitimate transactions are handled with the speed and convenience that consumers and merchants want,” Nelsen said.

Visa reported that it increased the breadth of each account profile in the Advanced Authorization model by adding more transactional history data and neural networks to analyze that data.

The result is more robust performance and improvement of as much as 130% in detecting fraud in debit transactions and 175% for credit transactions, the brand added.

 Visa reported the enhanced model includes additional risk indicators specific to Automated Fuel Dispensers (AFD) transactions.

“Visa's network now can pinpoint suspicious activity at a gas station and apply that to all transactions processed through that station. The model also uses account velocity at AFDs compared to that account's normal behavior in the score determination. This can potentially increase the effectiveness of fraud detection in this segment by as much as 266% for debit transactions and 163% in credit,” Visa said.