Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)
SCA is a new requirement for authorising online payments in Europe as part of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2).
Essentially, it was introduced to reduce online fraud and make online and contactless offline payments more secure.
If you’ve used Apple Pay, Google Pay or had to approve a purchase through your online banking account to complete a payment, you’ve used a payment authentication method that is SCA compliant.
As a business, you need to make sure your checkouts have sufficient authentication built in. This will be essential if you want to take payments and comply with SCA requirements. The authentication will need to include at least two of these methods:
- Something only the customer knows – a password or pin
- Something only the customer has – their phone etc
- Something only the customer is – their fingerprint or facial recognition
