E-commerce transactions represent one of the most vulnerable industries and require additional protection against fraud. In order to grant this protection, 3D-Secure protocol was developed.

If you need to handle e-commerce transactions, incorporating 3D-Secure verification functionality into your payment gateway might be a good idea. Some of your customers might be using the payment page. To deal with these customers, you need to include 3D-Secure-related functions into checkout mechanism, already implemented within your payment page. To deal with customers, who are not using the payment page and prefer to submit their transactions through an API, you need to develop a special procedure, allowing you to redirect these customers to the web-site of the card issuer for verification of identity.

Implementation of 3D-Secure mechanism is not a complex process. However, it includes such an important step as the choice of merchant plug-in (MPI) provider. An MPI is a special module, designed to verify if a particular card is enrolled in the 3D-Secure program. This verification is performed prior to the customer’s identity check. Only if MPI verification indicates that a particular card is enrolled in 3D-Secure program, the customer can be redirected to the issuing bank’s web-site for the check of identity.

More detailed description of 3D-Secure verification process can be found in the respective article on #Paylosophy.