ADIB Becomes First Bank Anywhere to Run Visa's Threat Intelligence Platform

Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank has gone live with the Visa Threat Intelligence Platform, making it the first bank anywhere to run the system. The tool merges cyber intelligence with payment intelligence, and routes both to the people who have to act on them.

ADIB did more than buy a licence. It worked alongside Visa to shape the platform's first use cases and the operational framework underneath them, then wired the finished product into its own fraud prevention framework.

Finding the link between a breach and a payment

The premise is straightforward. A large share of fraudulent transactions can be traced back to something that happened earlier — stolen credentials, a data breach, a system exploited and left open. By the time the fraudulent payment lands, the warning signs existed days or weeks before.

VTIP is built to shorten that gap. It gives cybersecurity, fraud and risk teams a live view of threats circulating in the financial sector, and supports three jobs at once: spotting risks as they emerge, investigating suspicious activity, and responding when an attack changes shape. Catching a risk early is the point. Stopping it before it turns into fraud is the outcome.

Visa drew on capabilities it already uses to defend its own network, which the company says operates across more than 200 countries. That network blocks roughly 90 million cyberattacks and about 11 million phishing emails every month, according to Visa.

Why a bank in the UAE moved first

Salima Gutieva, who leads Visa in the UAE, said the platform deepens the support Visa gives local financial institutions, and that it is meant to help them absorb shocks, protect customers and get ahead of risks still forming.

Amit Malhotra, ADIB's Global Head of Retail Banking, framed the early adoption as a signal of how the bank approaches technology — and of its intent to keep customer trust intact as the threat surface widens.

The deployment fits two agendas at once. ADIB has been directing spending toward tools that safeguard customer assets. The wider UAE push to build a secure digital economy gives that spending a policy backdrop, with banks under pressure to demonstrate that security keeps pace with the volume of transactions moving online.

Payment fraud rarely announces itself. It arrives as a legitimate-looking transaction authorised with credentials lifted somewhere else, which is why intelligence that crosses the boundary between a bank's security operations centre and its fraud team carries weight. Most institutions still run those functions on separate tracks, with separate data and separate escalation paths.

Visa has not disclosed commercial terms, nor how many institutions it expects to sign next. For now the reference customer is a single bank in Abu Dhabi, and the test will be whether the earlier warnings it promises translate into fewer losses.