Barclaycard Payments announced a partnership with fraud prevention provider Kount to offer merchants AI-based tools that detect fraud in real time and consider SCA requirements.
Rolling out these SCA-focused solutions now should help merchants overcome a lack of preparation and the added friction the requirements create for customers.
SCA’s enforcement date was previously postponed to give merchants and payments firms more time to prepare — and incorporating these solutions now may help firms fine-tune their practices before the new deadline. SCA was set to go into effect in September 2019, but its enforcement was delayed to December 31, 2020 in most European countries in part because there were concerns about merchants’ preparedness and compliance.
If merchants weren’t ready for SCA, they may have created poor authentication experiences or possibly faced punishments for noncompliance. Now, some payment stakeholders are pushing to move the enforcement date back further because of the pandemic, but that may not come to pass outside of the UK, so firms may still be unprepared for SCA at the end of the year.