Online card payments have made every buyer’s life easier, allowing merchants to increase profits through the convenience of payment and high transaction speed. However, along with the level of convenience, the number of fraudulent transactions has increased. To help merchants authenticate customers quickly and seamlessly, Visa created the 3D-Secure 1 protocol back in 1999.
Since then, however, fraudsters haven’t been idle, either, creating a myriad of ways to conduct illegal transactions, so it became apparent that something new and more advanced was needed to protect merchants. The new 3D-Secure 2.0 protocol was just that. It analyzes 100 pieces of data to prevent fraud, including cardholder information, geographic location, previous transactions, mac address, device information, device ID, and other sensitive data.
The 3D-Secure service provider decides on the level of risk after analyzing all this data. If the risk deemed high, the cardholder has to additionally verify his/her identity through two-factor authentication or biometric data. If after that the transaction deemed high risk, no further action is required from the buyer. The issuer will send the authentication results to the seller.