Whether or not the misfortune has fallen upon you personally, you probably know someone in your direct circle of friends or family who has been the victim of card theft or fraud.
That cold feeling of panic when you realise you’ve left your wallet at the bar, or that it fell out of your pocket while rushing to work, or the blind fear that someone may have actually pickpocketed you, or seemed to take note of your credit card numbers. Even more puzzling is the realisation that while making a payment online, somehow your transaction was not secure, and suddenly mysterious charges start showing up all over your accounts. The process that follows this desperately frustrating situation is quite enough to make a person consider physically stowing away one’s wealth altogether by burying it under a tree, dealing in a barter system, and doing away with the whole cracked financial system for good. After being battered by a hapless string of events, the hours it then takes to simply reach a bank employee on the phone to subsequently block your card, and then wait, not days, but weeks, in order to get a new card is enough to wake a person in the middle of the night in cold sweats for the sheer interminable inconvenience of it all.
Well, whether you have been through it or not, the good news is that you may never have to go through this process ever again. The Wega Financial Payment Solution is (finally) here, to deliver the most robust and secure payment method on the market. This is somewhat in direct response to the plain facts: last year, gross fraud losses reached $22.80 billion, up 4.4% over 2015 according to the Nilson Report published in 2017. The report further points out that the U.S. alone accounted for $9.00 billion or 39.5% of the worldwide gross card fraud losses, and that issuers across the globe are going to have to start adhering to more robust authentication processes. Thus ushering in the age of 3D Secure 2.0, and the state-of-the-art technology created to satisfy the Payment Services Directive 2 or PSD2 banking law.
Making Sense of Gibberish
3D Secure 2.0 and PSD2 might sound like a whole lot of Star Wars-related babbling, but simply put, this collection of letters and numbers is the new face of banking as we know it. To keep it short, the PSD2 law requires two steps of authentication to be made for any online payment. This is different than what many of us online shoppers may have experienced before, as 3D Secure involves just one extra layer of security and authentication. This process takes place in the form of a code sent via SMS to your phone, or an extra password requirement as used in the Verified by Visa system. This helps to prevent a specific type of fraud in Card Not Present transactions, that is, any transactions taking place online, where it is not possible to verify if a person’s card is even physically present at the time of transaction.
The PSD2 law requires the transaction to be proven with at least two categories of authentication out of three, as a regulatory technical standard for customer protection, or in plain English: to fully prove one’s identity. A press release from the European Commission issued in November 2017 outlines perfectly what constitutes a customer being protected while making electronic payments and transactions, and which elements are needed.
To prove their identity, users will have to provide at least two separate elements out of these three:
- Something they know (a password or PIN code);
- Something they own (a card, a mobile phone); and
- Something they are (biometrics, e.g. fingerprint or iris scan).
For further light reading on this topic, see the European Commission press release in full.
Wega has implemented this directly and wholeheartedly by utilising: What I Have (the card itself), What I Am (biometric authentication either using voice, fingerprint, or facial recognition), and What I Know (a pin code). If two out of three of these options are satisfied, you instantly have the most secure payment method on the market. And this is where Wega comes in, currently the only payment solution built to satisfy every possible standard of security, at your fingertips.