With tough new laws for Strong Customer Authentication set to come into force across Europe, a survey of 4000 online shoppers in four core markets finds that up to a half have been forced to abandon purchases because of lengthy or complex security.
The study, conducted by GoCardless in the UK, France, Germany and Spain, found that nearly half of UK consumers (43%) said that “speed and ease of payment” was the most important factor when paying for something online, compared to less than a fifth in Spain (17%) and one third in France (32%) and Germany (33%).
Yet shoppers in all markets placed high value on a secure checkout process: French shoppers showed the greatest preference for security (62%), followed closely by German (61%), Spanish (58%) and UK (55%).
The research also found that 44% of UK shoppers had abandoned an online order because of complex or lengthy security, while 48% had done so in Germany, 40% in Spain and 33% in France.
The research is published ahead of the introduction of a new, European-wide, two-stage verification process coming into force from September 2019 as part of PSD2.
Considering the potential impact of SCA on UK consumers, nearly half (45%) of people would be frustrated with a favourite brand that introduced new security processes during online checkout and a fifth (23%) would shop less with that brand if it introduced new security measures. Interestingly, the need to give away complex security information makes as many people feel suspicious (40%) as safe (40%).
Duncan Barrigan, VP product at GoCardless, says: "Protecting shoppers from fraud when they pay online is crucial, and new regulation which achieves this should be welcomed. The flipside is that these measures, if implemented badly, could significantly disrupt consumers and lead to a significant conversion drop off for businesses."
With major retailers like Amazon already sounding the alarm, the European Banking Auhtority last week accepted that some merchants may require "limited additional time to allow issuers to migrate to authentication approaches that are compliant with SCA...and acquirers to migrate their merchants to solutions that support SCA". The regulator says it will set an ultimate deadline for conversion later this year.