Research areas

Artificial intelligence

Visa's position as one of the world's largest payment network enables us to serve billions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants around the world on a daily basis. Our mission at the data analytics team is to unlock the hidden value in this massive amount of high-quality financial data, and develop a powerful commerce intelligence engine to drive innovations in the payment industry and beyond. We conduct applied research in machine learning and related fields to deliver unique insights and capabilities to our partners and clients and help them grow their business. Our research areas include deep learning applications in financial data, supervised and unsupervised representation learning, predictive modeling for fraud and risk management, consumer behavior modeling, recommendation systems, scalable machine learning systems, privacy preserving data analytics, and related fields.

Research projects

  • Deep learning for commerce – develop predictive models that are utilized by many parties in the payment and commerce ecosystem using advanced deep learning technologies.
  • Scalable machine learning system – experiment with new generations of distributed systems for machine learning applications to meet the challenge of ever increasing scale and complexity in the data processing pipeline.
  • Security analytics – enable proactive defense in our critical network and system infrastructure through continuous monitoring and real-time anomaly detection using machine learning technologies.

Security

Today's electronic payment ecosystems are possible because of a host of security technologies and capabilities that were developed over a long and rich history of security research. Extending and enabling new ecosystems, spurring economic growth and improving the quality of life for everyone will require further advances in a number of key areas. We conduct fundamental and applied research in a variety of security areas that are utilized by Visa, our partners, and the world, including: mobile and distributed systems/cloud computing security, communication protocols and network security, cryptography and cryptanalysis, secure payment technologies, data and application security, malware and program analysis, user and data privacy, assurance and formal methods, security incident and event data analytics, and related fields.

Research projects

  • Advances in cryptography – build on Visa’s extensive data protection capabilities to achieve policy-enforced full lifecycle cryptographic protection for data in transit, at rest, and during computation, for all computing environments and scenarios Visa employs.
  • Distributed and endpoint systems security – enable end-to-end secure computation, data and workload management across the distributed enterprise, between ecosystem partners, and to/from the sea of endpoints and devices.
  • Secure data acquisition and analysis – balance advancements in cryptography and secure systems for strong and efficient context appropriate data acquisition, classification, protection and analysis across the computing spectrum.

Digital Currencies

The Digital Currencies team is building the next generation of financial systems that rely on digital currencies, including decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum as well as semi-decentralized digital currencies like stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Compared to traditional financial systems, these networks have significantly stronger resilience against cyberattacks thanks to blockchain protocols. This is primarily achieved by minimizing trust in various system components, i.e., even if part of these systems are taken over by an adversary and controlled maliciously, the system would still be able to function properly.

Research projects

  • On-chain scalability – sharding techniques allow consensus protocols to scale to a significantly larger number of nodes. The direct benefit of this is a considerably higher level of decentralization and thus a higher resiliency against cyberattacks.
  • Off-chain scalability – cryptographic payment channels can break the scalability barrier of on-chain scalability and allow decentralized transaction processing to happen at massively high throughputs. Deploying them in a hub-and-spoke network topology with a decentralized deferred settlement model can potentially allow the payment system to match the level of what Visa can process today.
  • Off-chain programmability – with the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that allow institutions to offer robust financial applications with significantly lower maintenance overheads but at a small scale, we believe off-chain programmability solutions would allow financial institutions to offer less expensive and significantly faster services by executing smart contracts off-chain, while still preserving the core benefits of decentralization through cryptographic off-chain protocols.