Secure online payments: protect your transactions and cut fraud

Secure online payments: key takeaways

A secure online payment: 

• protects banking data, 
• fights fraud, 
• meets regulatory requirements, 
• reassures customers at the point of payment.

Several technologies secure your online transactions: Smart 3D Secure, Tokenisation, Fastpass...

Your payment solution secures your payment flows end-to-end.

In e-commerce, payment security puts every merchant in a bind. Too much security and customers abandon their baskets. Too little and you're exposed to fraud. In France, online card fraud reached £1.2 billion in 2024*. At the same time, 58% of customers abandon their basket due to friction at checkout (Source: Banque de France, 2024). Both risks are real — and they feed each other.

Securing your e-commerce payment flows means not treating every customer as a suspect. It means identifying fraudsters with precision, so legitimate buyers pass through without friction.

*Source: Observatoire de la Sécurité des Moyens de Paiement, 2025.

What is a secure payment?

A secure payment protects an electronic transaction from fraud, interception, and data theft.

A secure payment guarantees that:

• Customer data cannot be intercepted;
• The payer's identity is authenticated;
• The amount and beneficiary cannot be altered.

The 3 pillars of secure online payment

Genuinely secure online payment rests on three foundations:

1. Data confidentiality: sensitive information (card number, CVV, IBAN) must be shielded against any interception.
2. Payer authentication: a secure payment must verify that the person initiating the transaction is the legitimate holder of the payment method.
3. Transaction integrity and audit trail: once a transaction is validated, it must not be modifiable. The amount, beneficiary, and associated data must remain intact.
   

Audit trail also serves as proof that a transaction was properly authorised — essential in any dispute.

What the regulation demands — and what it enables

The SCA requirement under PSD2

Since the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) came into force, all online payments are subject to strict rules. The central one: Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). In practice, your customer must verify their identity using two separate factors:

• A code received on their phone;
• Validation via their banking app;
• Or a fingerprint.

3D Secure: verifying the buyer's identity

The 3D Secure 2 (3DS2) protocol implements this requirement in your checkout. It acts as the bridge between your site and your customer's bank to confirm that the person paying is genuinely them.

The protocol also gives you concrete financial protection. If the bank validates the authentication and the card later turns out to have been stolen, the bank absorbs the financial loss — not you. This is known as the liability shift.

But there's a catch: if you trigger authentication on every single transaction, you create friction at every purchase. And friction costs you customers.

Frictionless flow: removing the obstacle for low-risk transactions

PSD2 — and the upcoming PSD3 — explicitly provides for exemptions on transactions assessed as low risk. These frictionless journeys allow your customer to pay in one click, with no additional verification step. To qualify for these exemptions, you must demonstrate a controlled fraud rate and work with a payment service provider (PSP) capable of analysing risk in real time.

That's exactly where your payment solution — like Payplug — comes in.

Key technologies for securing payments

Smart 3D Secure: your ultra-intelligent gatekeeper

Payplug's Smart 3D Secure filters risky transactions and lets safe payments through.

How Smart 3D Secure's intelligent technology works

With every payment attempt on your site, this machine-learning technology analyses dozens of signals in real time: has the card been used ten times in five minutes? Is the connection coming from an unusual country? Does the delivery address match the cardholder's history?

In a fraction of a second, a risk score is assigned to the transaction. Three outcomes are then possible:

Adjustable security profiles to match your business

Not all sectors carry the same fraud exposure. A digital goods merchant has a very different fraud profile from a furniture retailer. That's why you can choose from three security profiles:

The Prudent profile prioritises maximum protection. Strong Customer Authentication is triggered more frequently. Recommended for high-risk sectors such as consumer electronics or digital goods.

The Moderate profile delivers an optimised balance between security and frictionless flow. The recommended setting for the majority of online merchants.

The Dynamic profile favours frictionless journeys to maximise conversion. Suited to sectors where fraud rates are historically low.

Fastpass: a direct line to French banks

By choosing Payplug as your payment solution, you benefit from a structural advantage unique to the French market. Payplug is part of Groupe BPCE, France's second-largest banking group and the leading issuer of Visa cards in continental Europe, encompassing Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Épargne.

This direct connection to the issuing banks is the foundation of the Fastpass programme.

Here's what that means in practice: when a Banque Populaire or Caisse d'Épargne customer pays on your site, Payplug already knows their profile. It can identify genuine buyers with certainty — and prevent a bank from blocking a legitimate sale out of excessive caution.

The results are striking. Fastpass delivers up to 98% of frictionless requests accepted on BPCE cards. Those cards account for around 20% of French traffic. For these customers, payment is ultra-secure and entirely invisible. Zero friction, zero abandonment.

Veepee experienced this firsthand: after activating Fastpass, the retailer recorded a gain of 45 frictionless points on transactions below €250, equating to a 9-point increase in the gross acceptance rate on the BPCE scheme. Without any increase in fraud exposure.

Across all issuers, Payplug achieves 82% of frictionless requests accepted (Source: Payplug data, 2025) — 7 points above the market average on the CB scheme.

Tokenisation: no card data on your servers

There's another risk merchants routinely underestimate: their own site being hacked. Online shop servers are frequent targets for attackers looking to steal card numbers.

With a secure payment provider, this risk simply doesn't exist. Here's why:

When a customer enters their card details on your payment page, that data never passes through your servers. It goes directly to Payplug's highly secure infrastructure, certified compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). What circulates on your site is a simple numerical identifier — a token — that contains no exploitable information.

If an attacker hits your store, it will find nothing. No card numbers. No payment data. That liability never lands on you.

This architecture — tokenisation — frees you from PCI DSS compliance obligations for storing card data. It also unlocks features your customers love: one-click payment, recurring subscriptions, and automatic updates for expired cards. Security becomes a customer experience accelerator.

Reducing friendly fraud and hidden costs

A fraudulent transaction triggers a financially dangerous chain reaction for your e-commerce business: lost goods, logistics costs, but above all, chargeback fees and the risk of being placed under monitoring by the card schemes (CB/Visa/Mastercard).

• The Rules Engine against friendly fraud: our system counters "false refunds" (bad-faith customers who claim not to have received their order or fail to recognise a legitimate purchase).
  
• Visibility and Business Reviews: Payplug provides rigorous monitoring through quarterly business reviews to break down merchant performance in detail. It analyses the breakdown of payment failures by type of block (suspected card fraud, technical 3DS failure, customer's failure to complete SCA, etc.). You know exactly whether your site is being targeted by fraud waves — or whether you're dealing with user errors.

Managing your payment performance over time

Securing your payments isn't a one-off task. It's an ongoing discipline.

It's the role of a payment solution to support you with regular analysis of your payment performance. The goal: to understand precisely why certain transactions fail. Is it confirmed fraud? Customer drop-off during SCA? A technical 3D Secure issue? A soft decline that's hardened?

This granular analytical view identifies the optimisation levers specific to your business. Adjusting risk profiles, refining authentication rules, and automatically retrying failed transactions: every friction point becomes an action lever.

Payplug, an authorised payment institution regulated by the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR) since 2016, builds a tailored, secure payment strategy alongside you — rooted in the specificities of the French and European market.

A high-performing PSP does more than process payments. It centralises compliance, integrates fraud prevention tools, and optimises your acceptance rate.

Secure payments: the bottom line

A high-performing secure payment system doesn't try to block every suspicious transaction. It uses data intelligence to target real fraud — and let genuine buyers through without slowing them down. Through Smart 3D Secure, the Fastpass programme, advanced fraud management, and tokenisation, Payplug takes charge of your online payment security end to end: risk analysis, data protection, and regulatory compliance. You focus on your business. The result? 92.5% average net acceptance rate recorded across Payplug clients.

Want to secure your payments without sacrificing revenue? Contact our experts to define the strategy that's right for your business.