Starting next Monday, customers will have to approve online payments twice. The requirement already applies to online banks.
After a longer period and a test phase from the beginning of 2021, the time has finally come: In the future, customers who want to buy products online will have to identify themselves twice when paying, i.e. approve the transaction twice.
This requirement has been in place for online banking since September 2019, but at that time retail was given a delay in order to be able to implement the technical changes.
In 2019, retail and the hotel industry feared payment defaults due to the planned “two-factor authentication”. At the time, the reason was that the deadline was set too short for companies to change over technically in good time. The European Banking Authority and the Financial Market Authority (FMA) then granted trading a 15-month grace period. This expired at the end of 2020. Since then, a test phase has been running that will end in mid-March.
The change implements the EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2). According to this, every customer has to identify himself with two of three possible criteria for online payments: The three options are a PIN or password, a card or a smartphone, as well as a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint or facial recognition. The directive aims to make payment transactions on the Internet safer.
