The decision to approve or deny a transaction typically is made by the bank. But bank networks can crash because of natural disasters, buggy software or other reasons. Visa said its backup system will be available to banks who sign up for the service starting in October. The technology is "an incredible first step in helping us reduce the impact of an outage," said Rajat Taneja, president of technology for Visa. The financial services company is the largest U.S. card network, as measured both by the number of cards in circulation and by transactions.

UBS Card Center, which processes roughly 25 percent of all credit cards in Switzerland, has won the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards, presented in London. UBS Card Center's fraud team used the the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the FICO Falcon Platform to stop 84 percent more fraudulent transactions last year than in 2015. The need to optimise costs in the face of fierce competition meant UBS Card Center had to keep fraud write-offs to the very minimum. They were facing new fraud attack volumes but needed to uphold the highest standards for customer experience and satisfaction. This required the use of machine learning to minimize consumer interruptions while investigating more potential cases of fraud, all without adding staff.