Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)

Starting September 14, 2019, as part of a new regulation in Europe, Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is coming into effect. It will introduce the need for two-factor authentication on many payments in Europe. Payments that are not authenticated may be declined by customers' banks.

NOTE: We have been informed by Stripe that it mostly only affects European-to-European transactions i.e. where BOTH the vendor AND the customer are based in the European Economic Area (EEA).

In a case where, for example, a U.S. based business charges a customer that’s based in the EEA, it is referred to as a “single-leg transaction.” Since the business and the customer are not both based in the EEA, authentication should not required.

SCA is expected to be implemented slowly by European banks starting Sep 14th, so it won’t be a sudden and overnight change.

Card payments will require a slightly modified customer experience when SCA is required, namely 3D Secure. When SCA is required at the time of payment, a second popup will appear requesting that the customer approve the charge. Transactions that don’t follow the new authentication guidelines may be declined by your customers’ banks.

We've been hard at work implementing SCA/3DS on the payment processors which support it, and we have now released the updates.

#1. Paypal transactions are not affected.

#2. Stripe and Braintree are live for SCA/3DS

#3. Other gateways (Authorize.net and EasyPayDirect) do not have any specific updates in this regard. We have reached out to them but so far they don’t seem to have done anything in regards to SCA as of yet.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:

If you are an EU vendor selling to EU customers, there are a few steps you need to take in order to enable SCA support.

#1: SCA Affected vendors will need to enable 3DS in your payment integration settings.

Screenshot: https://monosnap.com/file/ZAru5EWHaiaGT5q6bdwWEv99LUBD7A

Click here to learn more about SCA and enabling 3ds for their payment gateways here: https://support.paykickstart.com/knowledge-base/vendor-strong-customer-authenticationsca-and-3d-secure3ds-vendors/

#2: SCA is only supported on non-legacy templates, so you must disable the "Use legacy templates" option in your products' settings(section 2).

Please note that after switching to the new templates you may need to check your template's design settings and/or reset the checkout template (resetting the template will reset any customizations in the legacy and non-legacy version of the templates)

Screenshot: https://monosnap.com/file/kRlTGh4Tdz2atki0mxrH7WJtrtz8LT

If you have any questions at all, please email support@paykickstart.com or message our Live Chat from inside your members area.