In the complex world of online payments, every extra step during checkout can mean a lost customer. That’s why Paysecure has introduced external 3DS authentication, a powerful new feature that gives merchants full control over their 3D Secure (3DS) process while improving conversion rates and customer experience across multiple Payment Service Providers (PSPs).
What is external 3DS authentication?
Traditionally, 3DS authentication is handled by your PSP’s built-in system, but when a transaction needs to be cascaded to another provider, for example, after a failed attempt, customers are often asked to re-authenticate, repeating the entire 3DS challenge. This unnecessary friction can lead to cart abandonment and reduced approval rates.
With Paysecure’s new external 3DS feature, merchants can now use their own 3DS provider to perform authentication once at the start of the payment flow. The resulting 3DS tokens (such as ECI, CAVV, and cryptogram) can then be reused across multiple providers during cascading, eliminating the need for repeated authentication.
Why does it matter to you, as a merchant?
This update directly addresses one of the biggest pain points in multi-provider payment orchestration, repeated customer authentication. By decoupling 3DS from the provider and centralizing it within the merchant’s control, the feature:
- Boosts approval rates: Transactions no longer fail due to multiple 3DS prompts, and merchants see higher success ratios on cascaded payments.
- Enhances user experience: Customers complete 3DS only once, resulting in a smoother, faster, and more reliable checkout journey.
- Reduces fraud exposure: Successful 3DS authentication ensures liability shifts to the issuing bank, protecting merchants from fraudulent chargebacks.
- Increases resilience and routing flexibility: Merchants can freely cascade transactions between PSPs without losing authentication context, ensuring continuity even if a provider experiences downtime.
Paysecure’s approach
Unlike other orchestration platforms, Paysecure’s system automatically normalizes 3DS artifacts and maps field differences across PSPs, removing the need for manual adjustments or brittle PSP-specific development.
Merchants can also define intelligent rules to decide when to reuse or reinitiate 3DS authentication, based on factors like time, transaction context, or provider performance. This ensures the process remains compliant, adaptive, and fully under merchant control, without any code changes.
With external 3DS authentication, Paysecure empowers merchants to deliver frictionless, secure, and high-performing payment experiences that drive both trust and revenue.If you want to find out more about our external 3DS authentication feature at Paysecure, get in touch with the team today.
