Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) with EUDI-Wallets
Short Introduction
Strong customer authentication (SCA) is a security practice that exists independently of the eIDAS 2 regulation. It refers to the secure process of verifying a user’s identity to log into an online banking account or to authorise a payment. Introduced and mandated by the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), payment service providers, such as banks, must offer multi-factor authentication to fulfil the requirements of SCA. This multi-factor authentication requires at least two of these three key factors to be asked of the user.
Currently, these are verified and presented based on the PSD2 framework and are currently expanded as described in the eIDAS Architecture Reference Framework.
Something you know
Which can be a password, PIN or passphrase
Something you have
Such as a mobile phone, smart card or token
Something you are
What the customer inherents, such as a facial recognition, fingerprint or other biometric data
The eIDAS 2 regulation, requires organisations and institutions to accept the European Digital Identity Wallet for services, where strong customer authentication for online identification of their services is required by European or national law. This includes organisations from the areas of transport, energy, banking and financial services, social security, health, drinking water, postal services, digital infrastructure, telecommunications or education.
Source: EU 2024/1183 Art. 5f (2)
Current State of SCA with EUDI-Wallets
As mentioned above, institutions that are required to implement Strong Customer Authentication will need to support EUDI-Wallets as a means of providing online authentication for account login and transaction initiation.
We at Lissi understand SCA implementation is complex and can result in a lot of organisational overhead. That's why we are already working together with leading payment providers, financial institutions and other stakeholders within multiple projects, such as the Large Scale Pilot "European Wallet Consortium" to develop and simplify the integration for organisations.
With the current timeline of the SCA processes in the large scale pilots we expect to offer the first technical SCA integration with PRE-EUDI-Wallets in November ‘24. In the meantime you can use our connector to implement and test various use cases such as the issuance and verification of PIDs, QEAAs and EAAs.