Visa and Switch Al Maghrib (SWAM) are joining forces to make card payments in Morocco safer using artificial intelligence. The partnership will check transactions in real time and stop anything that looks suspicious before it goes through.
SWAM will add Visa Advanced Authorization (VAA) to the national payment system. The technology looks at thousands of details, like where and how often payments happen, to spot possible fraud in milliseconds.
Hanae Ben Driss, SWAM’s General Director, said the move would make electronic payments more reliable. “Security is a key part of trust in electronic payments. Integrating Visa’s system into the national switch strengthens our ability to detect and stop fraud in real time.”
Visa’s Leila Serhan said the partnership showed a strong commitment to protecting consumers while encouraging innovation. “Using Visa’s AI fraud tools at this scale reinforces our shared goal of security, innovation, and consumer protection.”
SWAM, overseen by Bank Al-Maghrib, is the hub that handles payments between banks and merchants across Morocco. It is one of the country’s main financial systems and plays a key role in keeping the payment network stable and accessible.
Digital payments are growing fast in Morocco. Around 76% of consumers trust them, but 44% have experienced scams, showing the need for AI protection. Fraud is moving from stolen physical cards to online attacks. Online or in-app payments are now 7.5 times more likely to be targeted than in-store payments, making up almost 90% of global card fraud losses.
Morocco ranks 50th in the 2025 Global Fraud Index, putting it at moderate risk compared with other emerging markets. Phishing messages are the main problem locally, with almost 40% of consumers receiving fake alerts about stolen passwords or data breaches, and about a third getting fake notices claiming their credit card is blocked.
The VAA system helps fight these threats in real time. Visa’s AI blocked around $40 billion in fraudulent payments and stopped 80 million fraudulent transactions worldwide in 2024. It checks up to 400 risk points for every transaction in less than a millisecond, spotting high-risk activity in under 600 milliseconds. The system also reduces “false declines,” when legitimate payments are wrongly blocked, which cost businesses about $264 billion globally each year.
New types of “soft fraud” are also increasing. Some cardholders dispute legitimate charges, affecting six in ten merchants. Others exploit return policies, claiming they didn’t get items they actually received, which hits almost half of global merchants. Account takeovers, where fraudsters access a user’s account to use saved cards or change details, often follow phishing or data breaches.
