The answer lies in what happens before a payment reaches Visa’s network. The company develops real-time AI payment-protection technology designed to prevent and mitigate payment fraud and financial-crime risks. DeviceIQ creates a persistent device identity, evaluates the device environment and detects spoofing, emulators, jailbroken devices, cloaked browsers, agentic AI and deepfake-injection tools. Device, behavioral and transactional signals are evaluated in the background without requiring every customer to complete another identity check. The acquisition means Visa is moving upstream—from protecting payments to establishing trust in the identity, device, session and intent behind them.