What we're doing for the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) PSD2 regulation

As you may or may not know, the 14th September marks the beginning of a phased roll out of the PSD2 SCA regulation. Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a European regulatory requirement to make online payments more secure - its introduction is a response to ever-increasing levels of fraud taking place online. After the introduction of SCA, in order to prevent payments being declined, businesses will need to build an additional authentication layer into online card payments. This authentication layer falls into one of three categories:

Something the customer knows: this may be a password or pin.
Something the customer has: this could be a phone or piece of hardware.
Something the customer is: this could involve a biometric fingerprint or facial recognition.

We’ve adapted our checkout flow to include a new authentication process called 3D Secure 2; this is expected to be the primary way of complying with SCA PSD2. Ensuring compliance whilst prioritising and optimising for conversion rates have been our primary goals and whilst there will be almost no difference to a customer making a purchase, a small but significant amendment to our checkout flow has now been added. This is how the new checkout flow will function:

Payment Initiation: the customer fills in their card details and completes the checkout form to initiate the payment.

Dynamic authentication triggered: Our checkout platform detects whether authentication is needed. If authentication is required, 3D Secure 2 authenticates the customer using a method supported by their bank.

Complete a payment: Once a customer’s identity has been confirmed through 3D Secure, the card can be charged.

The takeaway here is that, whilst very little has changed, Ticket Arena and all Event Genius box offices are now fully compliant with SCA. That means absolutely no disruption to customer payments as the legislation is rolled out.