Strong Customer Authentication readiness

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), a rule in effect as of 14 September 2019, as part of PSD2 regulation in Europe, requires changes to how your European customers authenticate online payments. Card payments require you to use 3D Secure to meet SCA requirements. Your customers’ banks might decline transactions that don’t follow the new authentication guidelines.

To support SCA, you should:

1. Determine if SCA impacts your business
2. Decide which one of the SCA-ready products is right for your business
3. Make changes now to avoid declined payments

Impacted businesses and payments

Update your Stripe integration for SCA if all of the following apply:

• Your business is based in the European Economic Area or you create payments on behalf of connected accounts based in the EEA
• You serve customers in the EEA
• You accept cards (credit or debit)

While some low-risk transactions (based on the volume of fraud rates associated with the payment provider or bank) don’t require authentication, banks can choose to not honour these exemptions and request that the customer complete authentication. Even if you’re primarily processing low-risk transactions, update your integration so your customers can complete authentication when requested by the bank. Stripe’s new products and APIs help you claim these exemptions and maximise conversion by only requesting authentication when absolutely necessary. Learn more about SCA exemptions.

SCA-ready products and APIs

Whether you collect one-time payments or save cards for later reuse, Stripe provides prebuilt and customisable products to help you meet SCA requirements.

Integrations that aren’t SCA-ready, like those using the legacy Charges API, might see high rates of declines from banks that enforce SCA.

One-time payments

Accept card payments with the Payment Intents API and Checkout, a prebuilt, Stripe-hosted checkout flow that automatically handles SCA requirements for you. Checkout is customisable and lets you accept payments for one-time purchases and subscriptions on your website.

• Migrating to the Payment Intents API
• Use a pre-built checkout page
• Build a custom payment flow

Reusing cards

Save a card for later reuse with the Payment Intents API and the Setup Intents API. You can also use Checkout to automatically handle SCA requirements, or use Billing to handle SCA for subscription models.

• Use a pre-built checkout page
• Build a custom flow to save card details
• Use Billing for subscription models

SCA migration

You might need to update your integration to support SCA. For more details about changes you might need to make, see Migrating to the Payment Intents API and SCA migration guide for Billing.

For specific product recommendations based on common business scenarios, check out the SCA payment flows guide.