“This could prove to be an important step forward in online security as more and more payment transactions are performed over online channels.”
The biggest industry associations in the fields of payments, the internet, and authentication have announced a new cross-industry interest group aimed at fostering security and interoperability for online payments.
The groups involved are: EMVCo, the payments group overseen by American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay, and Visa; W3C, the ‘World Wide Web Consortium’ that oversees prominent web standards; and the FIDO Alliance, the developer and publisher of the most prominent on-device authentication standards. FIDO’s WebAuthn specification for strong online authentication was recently approved by W3C, and last year FIDO expanded its collaboration with EMVCo on the latter’s 3-D Secure security standard for payments.
The three organizations’ new collaboration is the Web Payment Security Interest Group, which will engage in activities including the “formulation of a vision for web payment security, development of use cases, gap analysis, liaisons with other organizations, and identification of standardization opportunities for each organization,” according to a statement. The Interest Group itself won’t establish specifications, with that work left to its constituent bodies, which are themselves now calling on their members to participate in the Interest Group.
This could prove to be an important step forward in online security as more and more payment transactions are performed over online channels. And it bodes well for provides of the kinds of low-friction authentication solutions favored by FIDO, like security keys and biometrics, as stakeholders seek to make online payments both more secure and more convenient.
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