Global Payments: Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) and 3D Secure 2

The roll out of 3D Secure 2 has been a long drawn-out process not helped by the COVID–19 pandemic. Part of the update has included additional fields some new and some previously optional fields now mandatory.

Telephone Number

Where previously a telephone number could be omitted from the a call to Global Payments the field is now required and must be in the correct format - including the country-level dialing code in the format:

44|123456789

This required a bit of mapping from the country code. This script will map a ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code to the relevant international dialing code.

Postal Code

Postal codes have always been recommended for UK addresses but the relatively new Eirecodes in the Republic of Ireland are a new addition and still not commonly used in Ireland.

As post code is not a required field for Irish addresses it will be up to ecommerce users to decide how this is implemented on their stores.

Temporary Work Around

As of Feburary 2020, a common work around is to use the store’s Eircode if the customer is unable to use their own Eircode. However, this should only be done as a last resort as it will impact the ability of Banks and Global Payments to carry-out 3DS checks properly. It is also important to make sure this is only used for the billing and not shipping address!

Country

The country field has always been a ISO 3166-1 numeric three-digit country code but oftentimes legacy software will either hard code this value or have a limited list of mappings against country name/code.

This script will map a two letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code to the required three digit code.