Payment is a fundamental aspect of the shopping experience no matter where and what you’re buying and it’s especially important when purchasing online, where trust and security are top of the agenda.

For online businesses (such as us), selling in the European Economic Area (EEA), there is a new revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) coming into force in September 2019. This is a new regulatory requirement intended to increase protection against fraud for online purchases. Any business selling in the European Economic area must comply with the revised Payment Services Directive and have a Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for payments to help mitigate card-not-present fraud.

The revised Payments Services Directive (PSD2) regulates the payments industry in the European Union and one of the major updates that comes into effect is stronger protection for customers who shop online using their debit and credit cards in an attempt to reduce fraudulent charges.

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is similar to what many people refer to as two-factor authentication: when you make a purchase online using your debit or credit card, SCA may require you to use two forms of authentication. For example, instead of just entering a PIN or password, SCA would prompt you to enter a code generated via your banking app as a second step. This hopefully makes it harder for fraudulent transactions to get through.

You are asked to enter this information only when it’s required through a technology known as 3D Secure - an extra layer of security that is requested during checkout to authenticate yourself. You will see the 3D Secure indicator starting to show up on purchases after PSD2 comes into effect.

Please be assured that any purchases you make online with Hic! after the 14th September 2019 will be PSD2 compliant.

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