Telefónica has joined forces with fraud management & mobile identity company TeleSign to unveil a new real-time alerts service for travellers abroad to enable them to enjoy worry-free transactions when making card payments abroad. The service provides travel alerts to the participating credit card provider or bank when a customer switches on their phone in a new country.
Telefónica Travel Alerts (English) https://t.co/R8oRHzASR0 via @YouTube
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According to Telefonica, all a customer needs to do to opt-in is provide their mobile number to their participating bank or credit card provider. The solution is optimized to work with even the most basic phones and there is no need for users to download apps or for data roaming to be turned on. At the same time, the mobile location data shared is only used to verify the user’s countr location and is processed in highly-secure systems using encryption that meets strict regulatory requirements, said Telefónica.
Phil Weston, Head of Mobile & Digital Communications at MBNA
We’re delighted with the results from the trial of the Travel Alerts service we’ve run with Telefónica over last 18 months. The trial proved extremely successful with a marked reduction in operational costs driven by a decrease in customer calls to advise of travel plans and a positive impact on card approval rates. We’re looking forward to rolling this out beyond a trial when available on other carriers.
Phil Douty, Director B.I & Big Data Monetisation at Telefónica
Given all the strong fraud prevention benefits and customer experience improvements seen in the trial with MBNA, we now want to help create a standard that is used by multiple mobile carriers and banks across the world.
