When it comes to ecommerce and payments, the biggest concern is cart abandonment at the checkout. However, tokenization and Strong Customer Authentication can prevent it
The Paypers sat with the Jukka Yliuntinen Head of Digital Solutions at Giesecke+Devrient, to learn how merchants can easily tackle the challenges of authenticating customers at the checkout and becoming a conversion winner, by leveraging tokenization and Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).
COVID-19 has been a major accelerator in the shift to digital for most of us – how we do our jobs, how we connect with friends, and definitely how we shop. Furthermore, because of social distancing, many brick-and-mortar retailers were forced to go online for the first time.
Which are the changes that the ecommerce industry will have to embrace to adapt to the COVID-19 situation?
For merchants, it will be essential to rapidly expand their omnichannel capabilities – which will bridge payments in any environment, physical or digital.
On the ecommerce side, we should see greater adoption of the kind of ‘one-click’ payment solutions. This frictionless payment allows consumers to shop in a seamless way. When it comes to payment and ‘easy buying’, this is driven by customers’ expectations both on how easy it is and on how secure one platform from another is to buy from. They have to feel safe when buying.
What types of challenges specific to customer experience are retailers facing when it comes to paying online?
This is a hot topic as merchants depend on the usability the card issuers are offering, in order to enable a nice checkout experience.
Online a customer can easily pick, compare, and choose what to buy, and also use different methods to do so. And bam, the checkout doesn’t convert! The big pain here is authenticating the consumer enabled typically by the card issuing bank.
At the checkout, the consumer faces two types of authentication: first when logging in and authenticating herself as a user of the merchant’s app, and then for a second time at the checkout, with authenticating herself as owner of a card. This gives friction that leads to cart abandonment.
What technologies/solutions should merchants leverage to balance compliance, costs, and UX?
With a card-on-file solution (CoF) like G+D’s Convego® CloudPay eCOM solution supporting network tokenization merchants can offer secure payments without having to store sensitive customer data, avoiding the need for costly risk management tools, and removing the risk of data security breaches and cyber threats. Instead a merchant can stay ahead of the competition by focussing on the core business and at the same time offer a state-of-the-art and convenient customer experience when it comes to fulfilling the payments at the checkout.
This is done thanks to optimised Card Lifecycle Management where the network token is decoupled from the funding card for automatic renewals, and as a result there is no need for the customer nor the merchant to update any card data if as/when cards expire as this is done automatically. Network tokenization offers significant benefits over proprietary solutions:
Combine CoF network tokenization with embedded Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), the customer experience will be even more satisfying at the checkout. If SCA is already done when the consumer is logging in to the merchant’s app, the issuer can rely on that authentication and won't ask for another one for processing the TRX, fastening up the payment process making it seamless. We call this delegated authentication.
What is network tokenization and why is it important?
The fact that the funding PAN is not stored by the merchant or PSP, each transaction is secured by a unique cryptogram, the network tokenization provides a unified global infrastructure and domain controls, the payment execution is secure by design with technology you can trust.
The European Banking Authority (EBA) was requested to grant an ‘at least additional six months’ for enforcing SCA due to COVID-19. However, the European Commission (EC) would not support any further delays of the full application of SCA (except for the UK and France). What steps do merchants need to take now to ensure compliance with SCA in time for the enforcement deadline (31 December 2020)?
The payment schemes and the regulators have invested a lot in securing the customers and not only online merchants. This enables the ecommerce to keep on growing with an impact on the development of online payments.
The challenge in developing new ways to pay online needs to take the schemes’ and regulatory requirements into account, but also has to provide a technology that caters the customers’ wanting a smooth payment experience. As technology is rapidly developing there is a lot of investment needed to stay on top.
From a security aspect, it is hard to do all of this alone. Even if you have the resources, you always have to plug into a network of systems for coherent E2E secure payment. I call this systemwide security which is the thing to ensure you are up to date. To have a vendor connecting the dots in this network, managing it all, merchants can really benefit and focus on their core business: selling goods.
How will ecommerce evolve over the next few years, especially when it comes to securing and authenticating payments, and how is Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) positioned to support this transformation?
Ecommerce is booming, yes. The growth of online commerce has accelerated and will continue to do so, especially as markets, such as those in Southern Europe, close the gap with more advanced Northern European or Anglo-Saxon economies and China.
The main driver behind ecommerce - corona or no corona - is still internet providing information and access to almost everything, with most companies using the internet to offer their services online. And after years of promise and variable customer adoption to digitalisation, the new-normal might be the last push enabling digital payments technologies to finally come into their own.
At G+D we see great opportunities for ecommerce to leverage on our tokenization and authentication solutions already in use online and offline, mobile, and physical. As a leading global provider of physical and digital authentication and payment solutions, with unique end-to-end offerings along the whole physical, electronic, and digital payment cycle, our solutions are securing billions of consumers in their daily life when it comes to pay.
About Jukka Yliuntinen
Jukka Yliuntinen, Head of Digital Solutions at Giesecke+Devrient, is well versed in identifying and delivering high performing, innovative, and business generating payment solutions for the industry, leveraging on his over 20 years’ experience in payment and identity technologies.
Jukka is also driving industry initiatives within the Mobey Forum, where he is co-chairing their Digital Identity Expert Group. And as an expert in his field, he is continuously contributing to papers as well as giving keynotes on numerous conferences world-wide on digital payment and identification topics.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jukka-yliuntinen-1576393/
About Giesecke+Devrient (G+D)
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now