From February 1,

credit card payments

that exceed

30 euros

will require double authentication;

that is, the presence of two

security measures

to increase the protection of bank users and the operations themselves.

In reality, the measure should have been implemented on January 1, 2021 (the regulation entered into force in September 2019, in fact), but the deadlines were made more flexible to minimize problems as the sector was not fully prepared.

The measure, known as

Enhanced Customer Authentication

(SCA, for its acronym in English) will affect both face-to-face stores and online businesses and is included in the regulation on payment services for all of Europe, as explained on the website of the Community of Madrid.

Strengthened authentication includes "many of the banking operations that we carry out daily, such as access to our account on the internet, electronic payment,

card payment in an establishment

, as well as actions that are carried out from a remote channel and can pose a risk of payment fraud ".

Broadly speaking, what this protection does is add

a second lock

;

an additional step when it comes to verifying that whoever uses a card really owns it.

Similar protections are already used by several social networks and online services and

send a one-time code to

the user's

phone

after the user enters the correct password.

In this case there will be three "independent" elements:

knowledge, possession and inherence

.

At least one of them must preserve the confidentiality of the rest, not be replicable, not be reusable and cannot be stolen online.

Thus,

knowledge

would be something that

only the client knows

, such as a key, code or the answer to a specific question.

For its part,

possession

would refer to an object that the client has (the most common would be a

mobile phone

), while

inherence

refers to something of the person himself, such as his fingerprint or face in facial recognition systems .

When making a card payment we will be asked one more step

In practice, what this will mean is that when you go to make a payment of more than 30 euros, in

addition to entering the password, we will be asked one more step

, which may be to enter a code received on the phone.

If the payment is not made with a card, but with the mobile, the measure could be to request the fingerprint (the phone itself could do it, since it would combine possession of the phone with inherence).

In addition, double authentication could also be required for payments under 30 euros if they have already been made at least five times or if

they have

already

exceeded 100 euros in purchases

after the last time this additional step was requested.

However,

there will be exceptions

: periodic subscriptions (services such as

Netflix

,

HBO

or

Spotify

, for example), some

contactless payments in establishments

(where the limit will be 50 euros) and operations in which the payment has been initiated by phone or email.

One of the most notable changes will be the access and use of payment accounts, which will mean that when making transfers or payments with the account, an additional password could be requested in addition to the service password itself.

The most normal thing would be to have to enter a code received on the mobile

.

The same will happen when making a purchase online or in person.

There will be a

maximum of five attempts

to apply strong authentication, which must also be 'resolved' within five minutes: this will be the maximum waiting time when a validation code sent to the phone has to be entered.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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