Secure Remote Commerce (SRC): more than a button

This secure and interoperable specification has the potential to ease the online checkout experience, increase transaction security, and simplify integration for merchants and commerce platforms. With the SRC specification, EMVCo is giving the industry the tools to unlock ecommerce opportunities and build different experiences. IDEMIA firmly believes that SRC, as a framework, will open the door to unleash digital commerce.
Mehdi Elhaoussine, Head of Digital Payment at IDEMIA

Today, payment cards are the preferred method for ecommerce checkout. However, card-based payments face challenges such as the rise of card-not-present fraud and complex checkout journeys that create confusion for the consumer, add integration complexity for the merchants and increase cart abandonment rates.

Like standard proximity transactions and the use of payment cards at physical terminals (secured by microchips), the ecosystem is now collaborating to create a standard that unlocks the online commerce opportunities for card-based payments. EMVCo¹ released the EMV® Secure Remote Commerce Specification v1.0 in June 2019 providing a foundation that will enable the processing of ecommerce transactions in a consistent, streamlined and interoperable way across a variety of digital channels and devices including PCs, smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices.

By delivering a single “buy” button that will appear on merchants’ checkout pages, any consumer who has previously registered their network-branded payment cards in the associated SRC System will be able to pay in few clicks.

A unified and smoother checkout experience

This secure and interoperable specification has the potential to simplify the user experience by giving the user a consistent and frictionless checkout journey. It will minimize the number of times the user enters payment data and other shipping information manually thanks to a consistent identification of the user and their device.

Ecosystem simplicity

The SRC initiative addresses the fragmentation and complexity of existing online payment options by enabling simplified integration and interfaces between the ecosystem actors such as merchants, acquirers, networks and issuing banks.

Security everywhere

The SRC initiative is also an answer to the problem of inconsistent payment processes and vulnerable data stored online and provides transparency of the transaction data available between participants. SRC is compatible with other EMV standards such as EMV Payment Network Tokenization (replacing the payment card data with tokens to add dynamic data in the flow) and EMV 3D Secure 2.0 (cardholder authentication) that can be provided by a variety of SRC participants to improve the protection and use of payment data.

The first EMV Secure Remote Commerce implementations are expected to roll out in the U.S. and then throughout the rest of the world.

¹ EMVCo is the consortium of financial companies that manage the specification for smart card payments and payment terminals