Visa and Wells' alerts: networking for safety and trust

The power of the alerts announcement from Visa and Wells is all about the 'network effect', that dot.com-era label for networks gaining in import as they gain in size and diversity of content. When EBay acquired PayPal, what was overlooked by observers is the network effect of the underlying fraud-analytics and commerce databases, working in tandem and real-time to enable better and safer decisions. Visa's partnership with banks such as Wells will yield similar benefits over time, and the involvement of a willing-and-able identity holder will cause increases in both safety and trust (note to marketers and product managers alike: a best practice in security and payments marketing is to always treat the latter as though they are overlapping circles of impact). Bottom line: to increase safety against identity criminals increase the size of the real-time analytics database, involve the identity-holder, and then market it. Javelin has been calling for such announcements for years, as our data show that this is just what the good guys need.