For the past 6 weeks, we've been diligently working on rolling out our compliance with SCA or Strong Customer Authentication.

This regulation will help prevent fraudulent transactions on your site and is quite an important update.

In this short guide, I'll explain what SCA is and what you need to know as an UpStroke user about it.

Let's dive right in.

What Is SCA?

If your business is registered in the European Union and you sell to EU-based customers, you should know about the new regulation rolled out called Strong Customer Authentication.

It was rolled out on 14th September 2014.

SCA will be implemented in phases and will be gradually adopted by the EU banks.  It will help stop fraudulent online transactions.

The good news is - Our team at UpStroke has worked tirelessly to roll out compatibility with Stripe's SCA ready payment gateway.

How Does SCA Affect The Payment Flow?

Not all banks will require the authentication process. But if your customer's bank asks for the authentication process then after the customer enters their credit card details, a modal pop-up will open up.

It'll ask them for authentication.

Here are the different types of authentication:

• A piece of information that only the customer knows like their security code or password
• A piece of verifying information may be sent to their smartphones such as a push notification or a code
• A physical identifier that is unique to the customer, like a fingerprint or Face ID.

Once they complete this step, the payment will go through. If the payment gateway is not SCA compliant - it could lead to customers' cards getting declined.

This regulation has been rolled out to prevent cases of fraud - so it's indeed a brilliant step in the direction of ensuring overall payment security.

Who Is Affected By The New Regulation?

If you're a merchant located in the EU and sell to customers based in the EU- you need to work with SCA compliant payment gateways.

However, if you're not based in the EU but your customers are - you will be exempted from it due to "one-leg out rule". 

As per this regulation, both parties need to be in the EU.

How UpStroke Is Handling SCA Compliance?

Every payment gateway has a different API, compliance requirement and their response towards SCA. Therefore, UpStroke is rolling out its integration with different gateways one by one.

Let's look at each gateway:

1. Stripe - It's the biggest and most popular payment gateway. In order to comply with SCA, they've completely overhauled their API. They've replaced their Charge API with Payment Intent API. In simple terms, instead of charging right away, they first check the intent - whether the transaction lies within the SCA compliance zone or not. In response to this change, Upstroke's updated version now uses its payment intent API.
2. PayPal - In PayPal, there is no change and it handles all the SCA compliance on its own.
3. Authorize.net - It's a very famous payment processor for merchants based in the US. For this reason, if you're using it, you're exempted due to the one leg out rule.
4. Braintree Credit Cards- We're closely working with the Braintree team as we speak to have an SCA compliant integration ready. We'll be soon rolling out our compatibility with it.

If you're using any of the other payment processors - that integrate with UpStroke - please get in touch with our support team for more information. Get in touch with support.

What Do You Need To Do Now As An UpStroke User?

Nothing. Yes, that's right.

We've taken care of everything so you need not worry. Just upgrade yourself to the latest version V2.0.8 in which we've rolled out the compatibility with SCA.

Also, we'll have upcoming version releases to offer compatibility with other payment gateways - you have to keep yourself updated to the latest version of UpStroke and ensure your license is activated so that we can keep you posted.

If you still have questions that we haven't answered in the post- get in touch with support.

And Finally ...

A big thank you to all our patrons who are helping us test out these integrations. Your contribution truly means a lot to us.