EMVCo Releases SRC Standard

The best way to lose money is to make it difficult for people to give you their money. Yes, that’s painfully obvious, but it’s a lesson reinforced every day in commerce — a lesson that holds true as more shopping goes online and becomes ever more mobile.

A new payment tool promises to ease a good deal of that friction. On Friday (June 7), EMVCo released its long anticipated EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) Specification version 1.0. The specification is available for free public download from the EMVCo website. According to the secure payments enabling group, the “specification provides a foundation that will enable the processing of e-commerce transactions in a consistent, streamlined fashion across a variety of digital channels and devices, including smartphones, tablets, PCs and other connected devices.”

Another way to put it is that new EMV specification promises to enable many more seamless retail transactions. According to Visa’s commentary on the specification release, “there are 23 information fields to fill out on average when paying for things online, from name and date of birth to shipping address, communication preferences and payment information today.” Doing so introduces friction into the retail process, causing consumers to lose patience or rethink a transaction, and abandon their online shopping carts without purchasing the items there.

The specification offers a way around that by enabling consumers “to pay with their secure payment profile, anywhere they see the Secure Remote Commerce icon, resulting in a fast, consistent and trusted experience,” Visa stated via an analysis sent to PYMNTS. “Additionally, merchants could see lower rates of declined payments and fraud because issuers will be able to securely receive more data, such as device information, with tokenized SRC transactions to make better-informed decisions.”

According to Visa, while shoppers are migrating to websites, mobile phones and voice-activated devices, their buying experiences have been full of friction because they have to manually enter payment details. With SRC, consumer buying experiences online will be easier, faster and more secure. By developing a standards-based experience, Visa said it helps ensure that the key principles of choice, privacy and security are upheld throughout the payments ecosystem. What’s more, it said standardization also helps streamline digital payments, making them more consistent and reducing the friction that can lead to shopping cart abandonment.

As for EMVCo, it spent last year acquiring feedback from across the payment ecosystem on the specifications. In October, the organization issued a draft version of the specification called version 0.9. The organization wants to allow merchants, payment networks and card issuers, among other payment industry participants, to contribute to version 1.0.

In August of last year, EMVCo announced the launch of the full EMV 3-D Secure (EMV 3DS) test platform. The platform allows 3DS product providers to confirm that their solutions will perform in accordance with the EMV 3-D Secure Protocol and Core Functions specification v2.1.0, or its EMV 3-D Secure SDK specification. Clients will also receive letters of approval from EMVCo. 3DS is a messaging protocol that allows consumers to authenticate themselves with their card issuer when making card-not-present eCommerce purchases.

EMV SRC is compatible with other technologies such as EMV Payment Tokenisation and EMV 3-D Secure.

EMVCo is collectively owned by the major payment card networks and focuses on the technical advancement of the EMV specifications.

The use of EMV-enabled payment cards continues to grow around the world, and that includes the U.S., a relatively late adopter of EMV. At last count, EMVCo said, 54.6 percent of all cards issued globally by the end of 2017 were EMV-enabled. In addition, the number of EMV payment cards in circulation around the world increased by 1 billion over the previous 12 months — to a total of 7.1 billion. More recent data was not immediately available on Friday but even so, that figures demonstrates the scope of EMV use in daily payments and commerce.

Now comes the new job — using EMV to promote frictionless eCommerce payments via the newly released standards, and see how much that works to increase sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment.