How to Make a Great Thing (Your PAAY 3DS Authorization Rate) Even Better.

The payments world is stacked against e-commerce merchants. They take the risk, and they bear the costs.  This was not lost on the industry and 3DS was created to help e-commerce merchants realize the same benefits as their “face to face” merchant cousins. We at PAAY have seen that merchants authenticating with PAAY do improve their fraud performance. We have been told by merchants that having our solution makes the difference between them being very profitable and not being in business.

When EMV 3DS version 2 was released, it promised to improve things even more. It not only addressed the lessons learned but also fixed many of the issues in version 1 and introduced additional, optional data. Version 1 used 15 data elements, in version 2 the number of data elements increased over 10X.  However, merchants are pragmatic, they looked at this additional data and asked some reasonable questions like “why should I make this additional effort?”. We can now answer that question.

The addition of specific data elements will deliver these improvements. We have spent quite a bit of time recently with both MasterCard and Visa. They have told us that there is a clear, simple formula for improving both the authentication rate and the authorization rate. Basically, this formula is to look at the issuer systems and figure out which transactions get better results.  Visa describes these data elements as being either “Highly Effective” or “Useful” by multiple issuers .  While authentications will work without these additional data elements, they are strongly encouraged to be present. 

Here is the list of additional data elements; it is split into two parts, data elements that PAAY believes will increase authentications and authorizations and a second list of data elements that should increase positive outcomes if they are available.

Data elements that will increase positive results and should be included

• Cardholder Name
• Cardholder Billing Address 
• Cardholder Phone Number
• Cardholder Email Address

Data elements that may increase positive results and should be included if available

• Cardholder Account Information
• Cardholder Shipping Address 

PAAY is confident that this will provide higher percentages of protection.

1.  Keep in mind that providing the whole list will definitely improve your authentication rate however providing even some of the additional information should provide a benefit.
2. Browser IP Address as well as Browser Screen Height and Width are automatically added to the message and sent by PAAY.