Using Visa at Online Casinos
Visa is one of the world’s most widely used payment methods and a prevalent banking option at South African online casinos.
Read on to learn about Visa and its security standards and the advantages and disadvantages of using this payment method at an online casino.
About Visa
Visa is an American multinational digital payment merchant headquartered in California, USA.
The company operates in more than 200 countries and facilitates electronic funds transfers through Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards. As such, Visa does not issue cards or set rates and fees for consumers but merely provides financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products that they offer to their customers.
Visa currently dominates the banking card company as it handles 50% of all global card payments.
Visa Security
Visa transactions are processed at four secure data centres heavily secured against natural disasters, terrorism and crime.
Each centre can operate independently of the others and process 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations per second.
Visa approaches payment security through multiple layers of protection. The company’s anti-fraud detection system has become increasingly effective. This system has reportedly decreased the company’s fraud rate by two thirds ever since it was implemented a decade ago, reducing it to below 0.1%.
Through artificial intelligence, the anti-fraud system analyses more than 500 risk attributes in a millisecond whenever a payment is made. The algorithm checks if the payment is made from a magnetic card or an app, if it matches previous account history and at what time and from which location it is being made. By assessing all these variables, the anti-fraud system can give the transaction an appropriate fraud probability score.
In Visa Secure, the company has developed a security system for online purchases. This system serves to confirm your identity and does not require you to download or install any software.
Whenever you make an online purchase, the merchant will send information to a 3Ds provider that assesses if the payment is high or low risk. If the payment is considered low risk, the merchant can process the payment.
However, if the payment is considered high risk, an additional authorisation step is needed. In such a scenario, the customer will have to enter a unique one-time password (OTP) code sent to him or her by the bank.
Using Visa at Online Casinos
As the world’s dominant card payment option, Visa has been a standard payment option at online casinos ever since online casinos introduced real money wagers around two decades ago.
However, despite its widespread usage and high security standards, there arguably are a few drawbacks compared to other payment options.
Let us have a look at the pros and cons of using Visa at an online casino:
- No Fees – Mastercard does not charge any fees whatsoever. If you encounter any fees when making a payment, it is set by the casino. Mastercard only charges merchants, never consumers.
- High Security – Mastercard is one of the most secure payment methods.
The SecureCode payment system ensures that no one can use your card details to complete transactions as each transaction is verified by a one-time password (OTP) sent to you by your bank.
- Featured at All Online Casinos – Along with Visa, Mastercard is one of the most featured payment methods at online casinos.
Regardless of what casino you are playing with, you can almost always pay with Mastercard.
- Long processing times – The processing times for card payments at online casinos are relatively slow. Once the casino has processed your withdrawal, you may have to wait up to five banking days for the funds to arrive in your account.
- Leaving Out Card Details – Although Mastercard has impeccable security standards, and online casinos use sophisticated SSL encryption to ensure unwanted third parties do not access sensitive customer data, you are still leaving out your card details when you make a payment – just as you would when shopping online.
However, the SecureCode system offers an additional layer of protection that makes it almost impossible for scammers to use your card information as they would also need your phone and bank logins to make a payment.
Nonetheless, if you are concerned about leaving out card details on several websites, you can use an e-wallet such as Skrill or Neteller instead.
Deposit and Withdrawal Limits
Payment limits are generally set by the casino and rarely by the payment provider.
Therefore, they vary from one casino to another, and many casinos set different limits for the various payment methods they offer.
Usually, South African online casinos have deposit limits as low as R25, whilst the minimum withdrawal limits range around R300 to R350.