What is Authorize.net doing for SCA?

As we’ve written about, SCA is a new regulation which will slowly start coming into effect from September 14th which affects businesses in the EU.

We’ve been working with payment processors for several months and have engineered a solution which meets all of the requirements of SCA with as little impact on customers as possible. You can read more details about this here.

However, a big surprise to everyone is that Authorize.net has decided to simply not implement support for SCA.

They have recommended that customers change to using an alternative platform they’re offering, called CyberSource. Unfortunately, this platform is currently incomplete, meaning vendors who use Authorize.net will have to switch to a processor from another provider if they wish to comply with SCA.

CyberSource does not support subscription payments at all without requiring you to be fully PCI compliant, and also doesn’t support SCA for these payments even if you are. There will be no advancement on this with CyberSource until at least 2020.

As such, CyberSource is not a viable option and not one that we recommend at this stage.

What does this mean for me?

SCA is expected to start being applied to transactions slowly over the next 18+ months, as the majority of EU countries have announced a phased rollout.

I am located outside of the EU

If you’re using Authorize.net and you’re located outside of the EU, even if your customers are inside the EU, you are very likely to see little to no impact because of these changes. SCA does not apply in these cases, and while you may see a small increase in the overall number of declines from EU customers, this is reportedly unlikely.

I am located inside the EU

However, if you’re using Authorize.net and you are in the EU, we do not recommend that you continue to use them as your payment processor. We would strongly advise moving to Stripe or PayPal.

We will continue to follow up with Authorize.net and see if they decide to comply with SCA in the future, and we will monitor CyberSource once they are feature-complete and support subscriptions and SCA.

If you would like to see us integrate with a different payment processor, please feel free to reach out to us and let us know here.