Consumer Authentication

Owned by Nick Simone
Last updated: Mar 21, 2023 by Suyash Somani
2 min read

Cardinal Consumer Authentication

Cardinal Consumer Authentication (CCA for reference), which incorporates the 3-D Secure (3DS) protocols, is a win-win for online merchants. Cardinal took 3-D Secure and made it better. The traditional implementation of 3DS has historically caused consumer friction during checkout, with unnecessary challenge screens causing consumers to abandon their shopping carts. Cardinal Consumer Authentication changed all that. We developed a patented rules-based approach to authentication, to give the merchant CHOICE and CONTROL over their buyers’ checkout experience. Cardinal looks at the issuer’s authentication experience (whether they are a risk-based bank or not), the merchant’s business (for example, if there are SKUs that are more prone to fraud, and whether transactions over a certain amount are more likely to be fraudulent), and helps merchants create rules based on the experiences they want for their consumers.

With CCA, merchants will increase their sales and improve their margins while streamlining the consumer and merchant buying experience. Improved margins are represented by liability shift on fraudulent chargebacks, potential interchange savings, and less manual review. Increased sales are represented by increased authorizations on authenticated transactions, the ability to sell in mandated regions, and fewer false positives.

Cardinal Consumer Authentication allows merchants to enable card network programs including Verified by Visa®, MasterCard SecureCode® and Identity Check®, American Express SafeKey®, Discover ProtectBuy® and Diners International® and JCB J-Secure®.  


Choose an Integration Approach

By now, you should have completed the Getting Started section to incorporate the baseline integration of our Cardinal Cruise JavaScript. The next step is to choose an integration approach for CCA.

Cardinal Cruise Standard

The Cardinal Cruise Standard integration is purely a JavaScript approach that is all encompassing. When enabling this approach for CCA, this integration will handle the device data collection, initiating the transaction for CCA, presenting the authentication session if required, and returning the results of authentication once completed. This is a simple and easy approach is our recommended integration approach for CCA.

Cardinal Cruise Hybrid

The Cardinal Cruise Hybrid integration decouples the integration to allow a merchant more flexibility and control based on the number of their systems involved. The Cardinal Cruise Hybrid integration uses Songbird.js for device data collection, will require a backend server-to-server API call to initiate the transaction (if an authentication session is required), then feed the API results into Songbird.js for rendering the authentication session. This approach is typically recommended for customers who have already integrated to our API calls and want to upgrade to our Cardinal Cruise solution, have different layers in their payment processing infrastructure, or who use tokenization on the front end.