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PARIS—Visa Inc. today announced the North American rollout of a service that enables issuers to send immediate mobile phone text-message transaction alerts to credit, debit and prepaid cardholders. With the service, issuers in the United States and Canada for the first time can notify cardholders immediately when they authorize specific types of transactions at the point of sale; previous transaction-alert offerings required transactions to clear and settle before issuers could alert cardholders. "This service is a significant departure from other text-message and e-mail transaction alerts that could take hours or days to clear and settle," Elizabeth Buse, Visa head of product, told CardLine today at the Cartes & IDentification show in Paris. The new transaction-alert service is virtually instantaneous, or "near-real-time," enabling cardholders to receive text notifications within "a few seconds," depending on their wireless carrier's text-message transmission speed, Visa said in a news release. Cardholders may choose which types of transactions trigger text-message alerts. Options include international or card-not-present transactions, ATM withdrawals, declined transactions, and transactions exceeding thresholds set by the cardholder. Some 2,000 cardholders at several North American financial institutions tested the service over the past 12 months, Visa said. U.S. Bancorp, which was among those involved, offers the service to certain debit cardholders, according to Visa. The card brand is in discussions with several other issuers that plan to roll out the service to cardholders, Buse said, declining to name the institutions or say when others might offer the service. "This service is designed to give consumers more peace of mind in avoiding most types of fraud," Buse said. The service also can operate as an account-management tool, "helping people to control and manage their card usage," she said. Most card issuers and networks, including MasterCard Worldwide, American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services, offer consumers a variety of e-mail and text-message alerts related to transaction activity and account status, including when payments are received or when cardholders near or exceed their credit limits. Visa, however, claims to be the first to offer consumers instant notification at the time of authorization. MasterCard this year unveiled inControl, a transaction-notification service Citigroup Inc. is deploying for corporate card issuers (CardLine, 8/26). A MasterCard spokesperson tells CardLine other issuers "soon" will roll out inControl to consumer cardholders, but he did not specify when or name the issuers.
