Ready for 3-D Secure?
The next step in the fight against on-line fraud is about to be taken as Visa and Maestro adopt 3-D Secure. These arrangements will be known as ‘Verified by Visa’ and Mastercard Secure respectively. 3-D secure provides for an extra step in the card payment process which requires the customer to type in the equivalent of a PIN number. The extra security this allows is the equivalent of the a card PIN number now common for offline usage and provides a far higher confidence that the user of the card is actually the card holder. 3-D secure will be recommenced to customers by their card issuing banks as an extra (free) service and many will no doubt be taking this up given it makes it far more difficult for someone to use their card should they loose it. For the e-commerce sit owner key benefits include:
- When a 3-D Secure transaction has been made, the liability to repay a customer in a charge back situation passes from the vendor to the customers card issuing bank.
- Customers can shop on the site with more confidence.
- The incidence of fraudulent sales will reduce (cards will not be accepted without the 3-D secure password)
- There is the potential to negotiate lower transaction charges with the acquiring bank
Card type affected are:
Visa, Maestro, Mastercard, Solo, Switch
Time scale: all sites using the above cards need to be be 3-D Secure compliant by June 07 or these cards will not be accepted.
The payment gateway and e-commerce site implications are as follows. Each payment gateway, Protx, Worldpay, Secpay etc… will modify their servers to include an extra step where the cardholder is taken to a page on the card issuers website where they enrol (first time only) and are authorised (via insertion of a password). On successful authorisation the cardholder is then taken back to the payment gateway site and continues the payment transaction as before.
Website modifications are required and Bathcomms are able to do these for existing VirtueMart equipped shopping carts. It may be prudent to make some information on 3-D secure available to customers on the site too and we are assessing this. Note too that with the change in Switch to Maestro in June 2007, this logo should be deleted from sites.
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