$100m spent on eftpos digital upgrades over 5 years
· New state of the art security features expected to be available to all Australian banks and Financial Institutions by November 2021 and rolled out by May 2022
· 3DS certifications and new fraud scoring partnership are already in place
· Driving competition and lower costs for the Digital Economy
eftpos today announced it was on track to bring large-scale payments competition to Australia’s online retailer sector in November, with a range of additional security features now available to the payments industry.
The new features mean eftpos online transactions including Least Cost Routing (LCR), will enter the market with significantly less risk to traditional security vulnerabilities that currently cost the Digital Economy and online businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
These new features are part of the $100m spent on eftpos’ digital upgrade over five years and come in addition to other secure digital payments initiatives that eftpos is also rolling out in the Digital Economy including QR code payments experience infrastructure, mobile wallet functionality and a digital identity service, connectID.
eftpos CEO Stephen Benton said consumers and online retailers using eftpos in the online environment from November will start to be protected by state-of-the-art fraud scoring capabilities, as well as the availability of additional security features including eftpos Secure (3D Secure) two factor authentication functionality and eftpos tokenisation services.
Mr Benton said recent certifications and agreements with global partners including 3D Secure providers Outseer and Arcot, Payment Security Division of Broadcom, and fraud scoring market leader Featurespace, were among the final pieces of the puzzle to enable the industry to roll out large scale eftpos eCommerce for all payments types, including high risk transactions.
“eftpos would expect eCommerce to be enabled by all of its Financial Institution members by May 2022, in line with mandates that were issued earlier this year. Most of the enablement work has already been done,” Mr Benton said.
“These new services mark an exciting turning point for eftpos, online Australian businesses and the Digital Economy because banks and financial institutions will be able to offer their customers competitive debit card payments services in areas of the Australian economy that currently suffer from a complete lack of competition and high costs,” Mr Benton said.
“This is a game changer for eftpos and Australian retailers because retail is quickly transforming to become an increasingly digital marketplace, accelerated by COVID.”
eftpos payments are currently already available in eCommerce for some Card On File payments where banks have implemented the service for their merchant customers. Since launching the eftpos digital service that enables LCR last year, it has been subject to zero fraud.
Mr Benton said despite claims to the contrary, eftpos consumer research found the vast majority of consumers want to help Australia’s small businesses reduce their payments costs.
“Consumers do care which card they use and which account they want to access, but they don’t care who processes the transaction. However, small businesses do care because they pay for it, and the difference in cost can be significant,” Mr Benton said.
eCommerce is a key element in eftpos digital strategy and roadmap that includes five key elements:
· eCommerce
· Mobile Wallets
· Digital Identity – connectID
· APIs and Fintech access
· QR code payments experience infrastructure
Mr Benton said the new eftpos Secure (3DS) certifications from Outseer and Arcot, Payment Security Division of Broadcom covered the majority of Australian banks, including the Big Four, in parallel we are gaining significant momentum as we progress with CardinalCommerce, GPayments and other partners supporting some major merchants and payment service providers in Australia.
He said that to highlight the importance of the Digital Economy for Australian retail, eftpos had invested close to $70m on digital initiatives over the past 4 years, including paying more than $30m in rebates to eftpos members to get them ready for the rollout of eftpos digital technologies. Another $30m investment is earmarked for FY22, including over $10m in member rebates.
Featurespace Founder and President, Mr Dave Excell, said Featurespace was deploying the Adaptive Behavioural Analytics (ARIC) Risk Hub within the eftpos network to protect consumers and merchants from card fraud in real-time.
“The ARIC platform focuses on learning good customer behaviour to automatically identify new fraud attacks and minimize friction for genuine transactions. This is particularly important as eftpos enables its new Card Not Present capability,” Mr Excell said.
Outseer Chief Operating Officer, Mr Jim Ducharme, said Outseer’s product strategy – to provide best-in-class support for the latest payment authentication standards – has taken a major step forward with the eftpos certification.
“We are excited to share more about our implementation of eftpos later this year,” Mr Ducharme said.
About eftpos
eftpos is Australia’s debit card system, processing over 2 billion debit card transactions in 2020 worth an average of more than $300 million each day.
