Have you ever been in the situation where you’ve entered all your payment details, gone to pay and then been asked for a password you can’t remember? Well good news, Mastercard and Visa announced last week that they plan to drop the need for customers to remember passwords and make the experience more secure and less frustrating.
So how do they plan on doing this?
3D Secure 2.0, Fingerprints and One-Time Passwords
Initially, streamlining the experience involves Mastercard and Visa co-creating a new authentication standard which ‘will be the largest wholesale upgrade to online payment security’ known currently as 3D Secure 2.0. This upgrade will not only benefit consumers, but also merchants and banks by involving fewer password prompts and invisible authentication.
Analysts predict that by 2018, mobile devices will make up 30% of all online payments. With this growing trend, the companies also plan on incoporating these devices into their new standard by using cardholder data to make the process of paying more streamlined. In the event that consumers’ payment request needs authenticating, they will be able to identify themselves with one-time passwords or even their own fingerprints removing the need to remember or store a password.
“All of us want a payment experience that is safe as well as simple, not one or the other,” said Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise security solutions at MasterCard. “We want to identify people for who they are, not what they remember. We have too many passwords to remember and this creates extra problems for consumers and businesses.”
These upgrades are expected to begin rolling out as soon as 2015 and will gradually replace the current 3D Secure consumers see today.
