A retail earthquake coming your way – PSD2

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: A retail earthquake coming your way – PSD2.

To most retailers when they hear about the new regulations coming out of Europe their initial response is almost always the same – alarm.

This is because the European Regulators have decided to shake up the payments industry and have initiated a new payments directive called Payments Service Directive two, which will have a significant affect on the Retail industry both online and in-store.

One of the key requirements of PSD2 is the idea that no data of the transaction needs to be shared with the merchant and each transaction has to use a randomly generated one time card number. This means that any retailer who retains the credit card number of their customer within their dateabse falls foul of the law and can be fined accordingly.

Even worse than this, is the new Data Protection rules coming on stream shortly that will fine any retailer 2% of their global turnover if they do not have a secure authentication process that puts the onus onto the retailer not to loose any customer data.  If there is no data to loose however, as suggested by PSD2, then the retailer is protected.

Whilst PSD2 may be great for stopping fraud and preventing hacking, retailers offering simplified payments solutions, such as one click purchasing ie Amazon and eBay, face disaster. The days of frictionless purchasing are over!

Help is on hand, however, from the MIDAS Alliance, an organisation that has been set up in order to help create a British standard that will allow retailers to work together to come up with a management solution that suits the Retail Industry. It is very important that the retail industry has a voice in helping to shape the new standard otherwise it could be dominated by vested interests within the payments industry.  As a consequence a working group within the MIDAS Alliance has been established that focuses exclusively on the Retail industry.

Andrew Churchill, the Secretary of the Alliance says “Now is the time to act and join the MIDAS Alliance before it is too late to have your say. With only two years in which to role out PSD2, time is not on our side.  This is why we need to move fast and develop a management standard that allows the Retail industry to have input in developing a working solution for PSD2.” Current members of the MIDAS Alliance include Experian and FICO.

In order to come up with a better understanding of the requirements, the MIDAS Alliance are working with the British Standards Institution, towards building a standard within the next nine months that gives the industry just enough time to integrate it before PSD2 is implemented into national legislation.

The MIDAS Alliance are therefore inviting all interested parties to officially join the Alliance and gain the benefits of membership. These include becoming Board members and obtaining lead roles in the Retail working groups that will help make aware any issues that are relevant to your organisation.

The next meeting of the Alliance being held in London in January and it will be the next opportunity for you to have your say