South-African authentication services provider Entersect has obtained certification from Visa for its authentication service, enabling issuers to authenticate online card purchases.

The Entersect software prevents fraud attacks when making credit cards transactions and when banking online by using customers’ mobile device as a second factor to authenticate the transaction.

After the credit card purchase is sent through to the bank, the message which contains the transaction details is transmitted to the customer's mobile device. The customer is entitled to “accept”, or “reject” the purchase. The response is sent back to the issuing bank, and relayed to the merchant using the Visa 3-D infrastructure.

Additionally, the software also provides a series of fallback services based on user connectivity ie, SMS transaction authentication, USSD transaction authentication and OTP generation on the phone. People travelling abroad will be able to perform online banking activities even though they use an alternate international SIM card.

In recent news, Visa has introduced a prepaid account that can be accessed through a mobile phone and aims to serve the needs of unbanked and under-banked consumers.