Skip to content
Book a demo
Back to glossary

Payments

SCA and 3-D Secure

Strong Customer Authentication, the European requirement for two-factor verification on many card payments, implemented through 3-D Secure.

Strong Customer Authentication requires two independent factors for many electronic payments in the UK and EEA. In practice it is delivered by 3-D Secure 2, which sends the shopper to their bank to confirm.

Subscriptions have a specific path through it. The first charge, where the customer is present, is authenticated and establishes a mandate; subsequent merchant-initiated renewals are exempt, provided the initial transaction was correctly flagged and the amount and schedule fall within what was agreed.

Getting the flags wrong turns exempt renewals into declined ones, and the resulting failures look exactly like involuntary churn from a payment method that was working fine.

Related terms

  • Card on file A stored payment credential used for future charges, subject to specific network rules and consent requirements.
  • Authorization and capture Authorization reserves funds; capture takes them. The gap between the two is where a lot of billing logic lives.
  • Decline code The reason an issuer gave for refusing a payment. The difference between a soft and a hard decline decides what to do next.