3D Secure (3DS)

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What is 3D Secure

3DS helps prevent fraud for online payments where a card is not physically present. Customers are quickly verified providing a fast and secure payment experience. By enabling the service you receive additional protection against customer disputes and chargebacks for fraud.

3DS version 2 has introduced a significant improvement in the customer experience in comparison to the older 3DS version 1. In most cases, a transaction can be frictionlessly verified without any further customer interaction by using additional data about the customer and card that was not available as part of 3DSv1. However, some transactions cannot be completed frictionlessly, in this case, the customer's card issuer will instruct Wpay to actively verify the customer through what is called challenge verification.

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Merchant configuration required

In order to use 3DS with Wpay your merchant needs to be configured & enabled for 3DS within our system.
Please contact us to have your merchant set up.

Wpay supports 3DSv2 for American Express, Mastercard and Visa. The 3DS brand acceptance marks of these schemes can be found in the following location:

Liability shift

The primary benefit for merchants using 3DS is a liability shift. Once a customer has been verified using 3DS (either via the frictionless or challenge flow) the card issuer holds liability for the transaction.

Should a transaction be fraudulent the card issuer is responsible as they have verified their cardholder through this process.

Frictionless flow

The majority of transactions follow this path, a customer and their transaction is verified and authenticated behind the scenes between Wpay and the customer's card issuer. The customer often isn't even aware additional verification has taken place.

Challenge flow

If a card Issuer determines the transaction risk to be above a certain threshold they may request additional authentication from the customer. The exact step-up mechanism is controlled by the issuer and common methods include:

  • biometric via banking apps
  • one time passcode via SMS or email

The challenge flow is invoked for a minority of transactions.

What version of 3DS do we support

WPay supports the following versions of 3DS

  • 2.1.0
  • 2.2.0

How does it work

  1. When a customer is ready to checkout they pay using their card.
  2. We take information about the transaction and send this to the card’s issuer for authentication.
  3. The Issuer’s 3DS provider determines transaction risk.
  4. If the risk is low, the transaction is marked as verified (frictionlessly) and authentication is complete
  5. If the risk is higher, the Issuer may prompt the cardholder to verify their identity (challenge flow), once verified the authentication is complete
  6. The payment is processed to the card schemes with the authentication results and liability is shifted to the issuer.
  7. Upon successful authentication, we submit the transaction for processing.

Updated about 2 years ago