Visa Malaysia Launches 2026-2028 Security Roadmap to Strengthen Digital Payments in the AI Era

08/27/2026

  • Visa’s third edition of its Security Roadmap for Malaysia outlines six key priorities to strengthen cyber resilience, modernise authentication, and protect the payments ecosystem as artificial intelligence and increasingly organised scams reshape the threat landscape


Visa, a global leader in payments, today launched its Malaysia 2026-2028 Security Roadmap, outlining six fundamental priorities to strengthen the country’s payments ecosystem as artificial intelligence (AI), automation and increasingly organised scam networks reshape the threat landscape.

Introduced in 2019 and refreshed in 2023, the latest edition of the roadmap builds on the framework of its previous iterations, as it responds to a payment environment where fraud is evolving beyond the unauthorised use of stolen credentials towards authorised payment scams that exploit trust, urgency, and human behaviour. It provides market-specific guidelines for Visa and its partners across the ecosystem to strengthen security while preserving the seamless payment experiences expected by consumers and businesses.

This is especially crucial in a time where information, communications technology and e-commerce have contributed 23.4 per cent, or RM451.3 billion, to the national economy in 20241. At the same time, Malaysians lost RM2.97 billion to financial scams in 2025, the highest annual amount recorded in three years, underscoring the need to advance security alongside the country’s digital growth2.

“As Malaysia’s digital economy continues to expand, maintaining confidence in digital payments is fundamental to ensuring that consumers and businesses can participate fully in that growth. Yet trust cannot be sustained by any one organisation acting alone. It requires financial institutions, regulators, merchants, technology providers and consumers to work together, combining shared accountability with the right security capabilities. With this roadmap, Visa is setting out a common direction for the industry to collectively work towards in strengthening the resilience of Malaysia’s payments ecosystem, while continuing to enable secure and seamless digital commerce,” said Jason Phua, Head of Clients, Visa Malaysia.


Six Priorities for a Secure and Trusted Payments Ecosystem

The Visa Malaysia 2026-2028 Security Roadmap identifies six interconnected priorities to secure the payments ecosystem in the age of AI. This includes:

  • Strengthening cybersecurity to anticipate emerging threats and enhance ecosystem resilience, including improving cyber readiness and oversight of third-party vulnerabilities. 
  • Advancing authentication for a seamless and secure digital experience by moving beyond reliance on SMS one-time passwords (OTPs) towards biometric and in-app authentication, including payment passkeys. 
  • Enabling safer transactions with tokenised payments by replacing sensitive payment credentials such as personal account numbers (PANs) with tokens to reduce the value of stolen card data. 
  • Transforming e-commerce checkouts to enhance consumer confidence and convenience through secure and streamlined experiences such as Click to Pay. 
  • Leveraging foundational standards to drive network performance by strengthening fraud reporting, merchant onboarding, third-party accountability and compliance. 
  • Building a resilient payments ecosystem to combat fraud and scams in the AI era through network-level intelligence, real-time risk detection and cross-sector collaboration.

“As AI and automation make fraud attacks increasingly targeted and scalable, security strategies must be more dynamic, intelligence-led and responsive. Visa’s roadmap focuses on strengthening protection throughout the payment journey, from cybersecurity and modern authentication to tokenisation, secure checkout and stronger ecosystem standards. Together, these priorities can help make fraud harder to execute while reducing unnecessary friction for legitimate transactions,” added Jason.


Turning Security into Shared Action

The roadmap calls on every participant in the payments ecosystem to play a defined role. Issuers can strengthen real-time decision-making, customer guidance and secure authentication, while acquirers and merchants can improve onboarding, monitoring and checkout security. Third-party service providers also play an important role in reinforcing data protection, compliance and operational resilience.

Regulators and industry bodies remain critical to enabling responsible innovation, intelligence sharing and common standards. Consumers can also further reduce their exposure by using secure authentication, enabling transaction alerts, and remaining vigilant against scams.

Visa supports these efforts through its global network intelligence and risk capabilities. As a pioneer in the use of AI for fraud protection since 1993, Visa today has over 150 AI and machine-learning models in production3. Its security capabilities include Visa Advanced Authorisation for real-time transaction risk assessment, Visa Consumer Authentication Service for secure online authentication, Visa Provisioning Intelligence to help combat token-provisioning fraud, and Visa Protect for real-time account-to-account payments. These capabilities are also supported by behavioural analytics from Featurespace, which analyses over 400 behavioural signals in milliseconds to detect anomalous activity and identify potential fraud with greater accuracy.

Visa has invested over US$12 billion globally in technology over the past five years to reduce fraud and enhance network security4. Through Visa Scam Disruption, Visa has identified and disrupted more than US$1 billion in fraud attempts over a one-year period and worked with law enforcement agencies to dismantle more than 25,000 scam merchants globally. As payment fraud increasingly shifts from technical compromise to social engineering and scams, Visa will continue partnering with regulators, financial institutions, merchants and law enforcement agencies to strengthen ecosystem-wide resilience and disrupt emerging threats at scale.

To learn more about Visa's perspective on the evolving fraud and scam landscape, read the Visa Malaysia 2026-2028 Security Roadmap.


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1 Malaysian Department of Statistics, Malaysia Digital Economy 2025
2 Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs, January 2026
3 Visa, AI: The Next Frontier, 30 January 2025
4 Visa, Malaysia Security Roadmap

 

About Visa

Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating transactions between consumers, sellers, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at Visa.com.