14th Sept came and the travel sector still looked like it was still not ready for two-factor customer verification. A report released days before the September 14 cut-off date showed that most sector executives were worried about their preparedness to meet the terms of the new regulation.
The findings report by Amadeus dabbed Preparing for Two-factor Authentication, released less than a week before the deadline, found only 1 in 3 travel companies ready to implement SCA by the cut-off date.
About Strong Customer Authentication
The move towards Strong Customer Authentication is an initiative to deal with CNP or card-not-present fraud.
This is a form of eCommerce scam that makes it easier for somebody to use a customer’s card number to buy items online without their permission.
SCA will offer an extra layer of security making it much harder to buy with someone else’s card.
Predicted SCA Adoption Challenges
The same study also revealed that more than half of air travel companies (65 percent) feared strong customer Authentication would have a negative impact on sales.
The adoption of SCA won’t be easy in the travel sector as in many other sectors. Despite plans by some local lawmakers to add a grace period to travel to provide some wiggle room; airlines, PSPs and banking institutions must now work as a unit to take on this new useful technology.
Extra security checks like a one-use code forwarded to a customer’s phone may increase abandonment levels by 10 to 20 percent.
And the worst that could happen;
Card-issuing firms play the role of applying strong customer authentication, but other parties in the transaction chain like the acquiring company and the retailers must upgrade to better systems if they are going to implement SCA. With obsolete systems, a card issuer cannot ask a customer to carry out two-factor verification, and the end result could be a rejected transaction.
Final Words
But these anticipated negative impacts—i.e., high abandonment rates— could be transitory. The so-called grace periods may allow the sector ample time to shift to a more secure method of traveler authentication.
Again travelers will soon accept the method once they realize the regulation cuts across the industry.