Visa is set to acquire e-commerce payment authentication company CardinalCommerce, which provides data to card issuers for increased online transparency, it was announced today.
“At Visa our goal is really to jumpstart the [e-commerce] industry,” said Mark Nelson, senior vice president of risk and authentication products at Visa. “By partnering with CardinalCommerce, we can accelerate the adoption of this 3-D Secure standard.”
The 3-D secure standard, launched by multiple names in the payments world, seeks to better the online payment experience for consumers by providing more transparent data to both merchants and issuers.
Merchants integrate into the authentication platform, and then data from customer transactions is sent to the card issuer—a development that should help prevent fraud by increasing the visibility of digital transactions to the card issuer associated with that transaction.
“Everyone is involved with authentication, but the problem with a merchant [running fraud detection] in silo is that when it gets to the issuer, the issuer has no idea they did that,” says Tim Sherwin, co-founder and executive vice president for CardinalCommerce.
Sherwin added that CardinalCommerce’s sharing of that data share makes sure that every party involved has access—and that the consumer actively making the online transaction is protected. “We can identify that this is a good user [making the transaction], and it’s most important not to add friction to [that] customer’s transaction,” Sherwin said.
As the world adapts more and more to e-commerce, which means not just payments made on an online browser but increasingly through a mobile app, mobile browser, a wearable, or even through an IoT-connected device—like Samsung’s smart-fridge—authentication of the user on the other end is of paramount importance to card issuers and merchants.
The acquisition should be closed by Visa’s second fiscal quarter in 2017, according to the company.