Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, in collaboration with mobile identity company TeleSign recently rolled out a new service for banks and credit card firms to verify travellers’ overseas card payments.
Called ‘Travel Alerts,’ the service ties the attempted transaction with the card holder’s location based on a mobile phone signal.
Once a mobile phone is relaying signals in a new country that information is passed to the bank or credit card firm in real time for additional verification.
Users simply opt-in by proving the financial institution with the mobile phone number and the service can be switched off by the user at any time.
It works with even basic handsets and without switching on data roaming.
"Given all the strong fraud prevention benefits and customer experience improvements seen in trials, we now want to help create a standard that is used by multiple mobile carriers and banks across the world," said Phil Douty, director of big data monetisation at Telefónica.
It is not the first such location-based verification service to hit the market.
Visa launched a smartphone app this year called Visa Mobile Location Confirmation, which basically works in the same way but narrows down the location in a much more specific way – the handset is required to be at the location of the point of sale for payment to be authorized.
