Overview
Earlier this summer, Stripe announced that Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), a new rule coming into effect on September 14, 2019, as part of PSD2 regulation in Europe, would require changes to how European customers authenticate online payments.
This meant that card payments for these European customers would require a different user experience, namely 3D Secure, in order to meet SCA requirements. Transactions that didn’t follow the new authentication guidelines may be declined by your customers’ banks.
Learn more about SCA here: https://stripe.com/docs/strong-customer-authentication
SCA’s affect on Launch27 users in Europe
To be clear, this regulation affects Launch27 users that operate in Europe and have European customers.
In order to support this for Launch27 users based in Europe, we implemented these new Stripe features that would allow customers to authenticate their credit cards IF their bank required it.
These features affect when:
customers book using a credit card
customers buy gift cards
a new card is added to a customer’s profile
when staff put cards on hold or charged them
What happens when customers try to book using a credit card or buy a gift card?
If the customer’s bank requires additional authentication, Launch27 will show a special Stripe popup that will let the customer authenticate their card via their bank.
In the case of charging or putting the card on hold later for bookings, the customer may be required by the bank to authenticate their card again when you try to submit the hold/charge.
What happens when I try to put a card on hold or charge it?
When you attempt to put cards on hold or charge them, the following happens:
Staff attempts to put card on hold or charge it in Launch27
Stripe checks if the bank requires additional authentication
If the bank requires the customer to authenticate their card, then Launch27 will email those customers asking them to authenticate their cards via link they must click. Note: If the bank does not require it, the hold or charge will be processed normally by Launch27 as before.
When the customer clicks the link to authenticate their card, they will have to re-enter their card info and perform a similar authentication with their bank via the Stripe popup.
When the customer completes this step, Launch27 processes the hold/charge immediately.