Above: Illustration by souda/DepositPhotos

By Jorge Salum, Sr. Director, Business Development, Visa

Cashless payments are experiencing promising growth in Trinidad & Tobago, fueled by the increasing adoption of digital technologies. With this surge towards digital, cybercriminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capitalizing on vulnerabilities. While this is a global tendency, developing countries like Trinidad & Tobago are also facing a significant rise of phishing schemes, attacks targeting e-commerce, “free gift” scams and ransomware, among others¹.

Despite this challenge and in aanticipation of a growing and evolving threat, Trinidad & Tobago has been making tremendous strides in securing the payments ecosystem. Recent milestones include (1) the migration of the mag strip debit cards to a Visa Debit Card secured with EMV contactless technology, (2) merchants’ rapid transition to 3DS 2.0 secure (an advanced ecommerce authentication protocol pioneered by Visa), and (3) local issuers working closely with Visa Advanced Authorization – a solution that analyzes up to 500 unique risk factors to detect fraud faster – and other AI-enabled transactional scoring tools.

But there is more we can do together in Trinidad & Tobago to protect the integrity of payments, while also establishing the infrastructure to drive more innovation. This includes the implementation of tokens, a security technology that replaces sensitive account information with a unique digital identifier. In addition, merchants should consider incorporating a transactional risk scoring tool, like CyberSource’s Decision Manager, which leverages AI technology to help merchants distinguish between fraudulent and legitimate payments transactions.

At Visa, as a vital engine of global commerce and digital movement money, preserving and enhancing trust is a top priority. As such, we are strongly committed to accelerating these efforts locally and continue providing our clients and partners with added tools, technologies, and intelligence for better and more secure digital payments experiences.

To do so, we are taking an aggressive, multi-layered approach focused on four key areas:

1. Cutting-edge cybersecurity to combat sophisticated criminals,
2. AI and advanced data analytics to reduce and prevent fraud,
3. 360º protection of the entire payments ecosystem,
4. Advancing universal access to secure money movement.

To bring this strategy to life, Visa is behind the scenes deploying its vast resources and capabilities to secure every payment transaction. This includes over a thousand dedicated specialists protecting Visa’s network from malware, zero-day attacks and insider threats; three Cybersecurity Fusion Centers on three continents delivering 24x7x365 security monitoring and incident response, and several hundred AI models in production.

An integral part of our strategy is the continuous investments in groundbreaking technologies to help businesses grow securely. In fact, over the last five years, we have invested $10 billion in technology to reduce fraud and increase network security. Additionally, over the last 10 years we invested more than $3 billion on AI and data infrastructure. This helped us proactively block $30 billion in fraud in the first six months of 2023, preventing many from ever knowing they were at risk of a potential fraudulent transaction. We have also kept fraud at historic lows – only seven cents of fraud for every $100 transacted on our network – despite over 2 million daily attempts by fraudsters.

While the threat landscape is increasingly complex, we are energized by the positive impact digital payments can have on people, businesses, and economies. At Visa, trust is more than a lofty ideal. It is the essence of our brand promise, legacy, client relationships and global reach; it’s about ensuring we protect every stakeholder in our ecosystem no matter how big or small the transaction.

As we continue to experience a transformative moment in payment security, we’ll continue working together with our partners, clients and stakeholders locally to enable the secure, reliable and open movement of money for everyone, everywhere in Trinidad & Tobago to drive a strong and thriving cashless commerce ecosystem.