Glossary
3-D Secure
3-D Secure is the protocol of the card schemes, branded Visa Secure, Mastercard Identity Check and others, through which the issuer authenticates the cardholder during an online card payment: a push to the banking app, a one-time code or a biometric check. A payment authenticated through 3-D Secure shifts the liability for fraud chargebacks from the merchant to the issuer; the second version of the protocol lets low-risk payments pass without a challenge.
How it runs
The merchant’s checkout sends the card and the payment data to the issuer’s access control server through the scheme; the issuer decides whether to challenge the cardholder or to approve silently on risk data; the result is attached to the authorisation. In the EU and the UK strong customer authentication is required for most online card payments, with exemptions for low amounts, low risk, recurring charges after the first and merchant-initiated transactions.
What it does to approvals
A challenge costs conversion: some payers abandon it. Silent authentication and the exemptions reduce the challenges; a payment that fails authentication must not be retried on another acquirer, because the issuer has said no about the cardholder, not about the acquirer.
On the platform
Tranzify’s hosted checkout runs 3-D Secure through the acquirer’s page or server-to-server where the issuer asks, records the result in the journal, uses the exemptions the schemes allow for merchant-initiated charges with a token, and treats an authentication failure as a hard decline that ends the cascade.
Updated: 2026-11-08