Interesting stuff from Visa (Europe) as the company, according to Gartner, will employ mobile location detection technology to help protect customers against fraud – seems like a good idea! Here’s what the Gartner blog shared on the story… “The way they work is by tracking user locations via their mobile phones and comparing that to other transactions the user is conducting. For example, if a user’s phone is in England, but the user is simultaneously withdrawing cash from an ATM machine in Germany, that is cause for suspicion and will raise an alert.” Furthermore, regarding mobile protection, they also predicted among other things that by YE15, at least 15% of all payment card transactions will be validated using mobile location and profile information.
My Take – Personally, I think its fabulous… imagine using a service, we can say Google Latitude for example, where I’m sharing my current location (perhaps it’s Vancouver Canada), then a credit card transaction is attempting to validate card usage that’s taking place someplace else, perhaps thousands of miles away… why not? Services like Gowalla and foursquare are already heavily used by people in commercial outlets. Makes sense to me that if I check-in to Starbucks in downtown Denver that any credit card transaction attempted within a reasonable time and distance from that local could potentially be flagged as fraud based on geographic logic. See also this article on FastCompany for more on the topic