The major payment networks Visa, Mastercard and American Express say they are preparing for a better online payments experience by backing the EMVCo Secure Remote Commerce specification (SRC). 

The specification, announced in November, establishes the technical framework for enabling consumers to use their payment cards across channels more easily than current protocols allow. For example, a consumer could choose to set a tokenized version of their payment card with an eligible merchant though that merchant may not use the current card-on-file system.

As the physical point of sale continues to evolve, driven by the explosion of EMV chip cards and the rise of contactless payments, the digital commerce landscape is also evolving tremendously. This is fuelled in part by the proliferation of smart devices and internet of things, brought into the spotlight by new ways consumers expect to conduct their digital commerce. In 2017, consumers spent $453.46 billion on the web for retail purchases, a 16.0% increase over 2016. Overall, e-commerce accounted for 49% of the growth seen in retail last year.

To sustain this growth, there is a need for new payment experiences that enhance security, simplify digital commerce for consumers, and eliminate complex authentication and integration processes for merchants and issuers. To respond to this need, EMVCo created the EMV Secure Remote Commerce  – Technical Framework version 1.0 to pave the way for what’s next in digital-commerce innovation. The framework seeks to define, among other things:

• A consistent payment payload for processing and integration across networks and integrated cardholder security by replacing the sensitive account information stored in PANs with EMV Payment Tokens. EMV Payment Tokens complement and can also be interoperable with gateway / acquirer security tokens.
• Integrated cardholder security by integrating cardholder verification, issuer authentication and interoperability with EMV 3-D Secure, a messaging protocol that promotes frictionless consumer authentication when making card-not-present (CNP) e-commerce purchases.