Payments industry associations send joint letter to EBA on SCA delay due to COVID-19

Payments and ecommerce associations throughout Europe have signed a letter requiring the European Commission and the EBA to ponder over SCA delay due to COVID-19.

The signatories call on the European authorities to consider appropriate additional measures and coordination to assist in the smooth transition to SCA in all EU Member States equally. In the light of COVID-19, this should also include the possibility of an at least additional six months for the market to be fully SCA ready.

The payments ecosystem involves a high number of dependencies and parties must work together to implement SCA. The constraints the current crisis places on the roll out of SCA technology severely limits the time available for participants to test together, which is essential to a safe and controlled implementation.

In April 2020, the European Payment Institutions Federation (EPIF) hosted a workshop for a cross-section of stakeholders in card payment markets where the impact of the Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) implementation as a result of COVID-19 was discussed. Among the attendees were bank and non-bank payment providers, the merchant community, European and international card schemes. Overall, EMV 3DS implementation is progressing across Europe.

However, it is now clear that the COVID-19 crisis has significantly reduced the capacity available to progress SCA development and implementation. This is particularly true in the travel and hospitality sectors, and others which have either closed entirely or been hard hit by the lockdown.

Beyond the cards market, EPIF’s members have also highlighted that effective SCA implementation is a key building block to ensuring the smooth functioning of payment initiation service providers and account information service providers, as regulated under PSD2. Access to the underlying customer accounts should be able to rely on one single SCA.