Visa’s Innovations in Risk & Security AR app

The task

The flow of money is under threat with billions lost to fraud every year. Visa is leading the defence with a suite of AI-powered risk and security tools that evolve as quickly as fraud does. Alongside their agency, Shiraz Creative, Visa wanted to showcase these latest innovations at the Visa Payments Forum (VPF) 2024 in Istanbul, where around 800 people were expected to attend. And following our successful collaboration for VPF 2022, Shiraz Creative got back in touch to see how we could add an immersive, attention-grabbing element to their new stand.

We love a challenge. Visa’s security suite is complex and evolving – think highly targeted AI-powered decision-making tools that deliver an accurate risk score in the milliseconds between the tap of a card and the release of funds. Our job was to use immersive technology to demonstrate how Visa’s tools fight back – bearing in mind users may only have a few minutes to use it, without guidance from a Visa rep, with different products to be showcased in separate areas of the stand.

On top of that, we had little more than a month to deliver it from scratch. So we didn’t hang around.

The process

First, we had to get under the skin of the content. The Visa team were eager for the experience to give users a rapid overview of each product with the aim of gathering leads and drumming up interest for Visa’s wider product offering, so we held a series of workshops with global stakeholders across Visa (and across time zones). These helped us understand and identify the common theme that unites Visa’s security products: real-time control. 

Taking this idea, we pushed it further – devising a gamified tabletop augmented reality (AR) experience that enables users to trigger information about each product and ‘activate it’ to prevent fraudulent transactions. Triggered from a marker and tied together by an animated holographic 3D globe that flashes up interactive ‘fraud alerts’ for users to select, the AR experience enables users to explore each product in the order of their preference. 

We prioritised interaction to keep users engaged – designing animated information slides, multiple choice challenges, and the option to ‘activate’ the product to launch proven success stories. And with two separate markers, we could trigger different content in the relevant locations of the stand, creating a streamlined and spatial user experience.

Due to our tight turnaround and board of global stakeholders, we kept up constant communication with the teams at Shiraz Creative and Visa throughout production, responding quickly and adapting our concept to accommodate both changes to the brief and feedback.

The outcome

Built for use on iPads, the AR experience gives a holistic overview of how Visa’s risk and security innovations work together to create a word-leading barrier to fraudulent payments, while enabling users to take a deeper dive into each individual product. And with data capture and analytics built into the app, Visa were able to follow up every lead after the event.

They loved it. Both Shiraz Creative and Visa were blown away by the app in action and it ticked every box on the brief, surpassing expectations and enabling Visa to attract higher footfall to their stand, while capturing valuable lead data. As a result, there are talks to adapt it for further sales and marketing use in future.

And as the cherry on top of an excellent project, we were also able to support Shiraz Creative with the creation of separate app software to help power projected content on display in the Projection Room – showing just how our digital expertise can help across the board when it comes to activations at major events, however tight the timeline.