Entersekt strengthens 3-D Secure to help merchants and banks convert more holiday sales
Entersekt
ATLANTA, GA — October 29, 2026 — Entersekt, a global leader in digital banking fraud prevention and online payment security, today announced enhancements to its 3-D Secure (3DS) offering to help merchants and issuers turn more genuine purchases into revenue ahead of the holiday shopping peak.
When authentication gets stuck, the shopper who wanted to buy is lost, and with them the merchant’s sale and the issuer’s interchange. In early adopter deployments of the enhancements, however, net authentication success rates rose by up to 9.0 percentage points. When a shopper’s browser failed after authentication, results were still delivered for about 3% of authenticated transactions, worth approximately $423,000 over seven days, which would otherwise never have reached the merchant.
“An authentication that succeeds but never reaches the merchant still leaves the customer unable to complete a purchase,” says Dewald Nolte, Co-Founder and Chief Product Strategy & Market Engagement Officer at Entersekt. “The shopper does everything right: they approve the purchase with their bank, close the app and assume they’re done. If that result never reaches the merchant, the purchase never completes. Our enhancements make sure the result still gets through, so a broken handoff doesn’t cost the sale.”
Closing the gap between authentication and checkout
Online card payments can involve several steps: a customer begins checkout with a merchant, switches to a banking app or authentication page to confirm the purchase, and returns to the merchant to complete the payment. Browser interruptions, page reloads, or unreliable connections can break this sequence at different stages.
The enhancements made by Entersekt apply to the company’s access control server (ACS) and 3DS Server (3DSS). ACS enhancements improve the resilience of cardholder authentication when browser interactions are interrupted. 3DSS enhancements help preserve completed authentication results for delivery to the merchant when the expected browser return fails.
Together, the capabilities address two distinct failure points in the 3DS journey, helping issuers, merchants, and payment service providers (PSPs) reduce avoidable checkout disruptions for their customers.
“Our production results demonstrate how interruptions at different stages of authentication can affect payment continuity, even when the purchase is legitimate and the cardholder successfully played their part. They also highlight why resilience needs to extend beyond the authentication step itself,” says Nolte. “For merchants and the PSPs that serve them, an authentication only pays off once the result arrives, because that’s when the sale can go ahead. That’s the moment we built these enhancements to protect.”
Timing is everything
Adobe forecasts that U.S. consumers will spend $275.1 billion online during November and December 2026, a 6.7% increase year over year. With mobile devices expected to account for 57.4% of that spending, reliable checkout experiences across browsers and banking apps are increasingly important.
“During peak shopping periods, every completed purchase counts. When a legitimate payment fails because of a technical problem during checkout, merchants can lose sales that customers were ready to make. As digital shopping grows and payment journeys get more complex, checkout reliability matters more to conversion. Making sure the authentication result reaches the merchant, even when something interrupts the journey, is a practical step towards protecting revenue and giving customers the smooth experience they expect,” says Serpil Hall, Strategic Advisor, Fraud and AML at Datos Insights.
