PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication Gate (2D)

Merchant Risk Profile

Reference fraud rate 0.05%

Avg. transaction value €120

Transaction throughput 3.0/s

RTS Exemptions

Trusted-beneficiary whitelist

Low-value exemption (<€30)

Gate Readouts

Current TRA threshold

€100

SCA challenge rate

Frictionless rate

Transactions processed

TRA exemption (frictionless)0 Whitelisted payee0 Low-value exemption0 SCA / 3-D Secure challenge0

How it works

Under PSD2's Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS, Article 18), an acquirer may skip Strong Customer Authentication for a card-not-present payment using Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA) if the payment amount is at or below a threshold set by the payment provider's own rolling fraud rate:

fraud rate ≤ 0.01%  →  TRA threshold = €500
fraud rate ≤ 0.06%  →  TRA threshold = €250
fraud rate ≤ 0.13%  →  TRA threshold = €100
fraud rate  > 0.13%  →  no TRA exemption (SCA required)

Two further exemptions apply independently of TRA: a trusted-beneficiary whitelist (Art. 13 — the payer pre-approved this payee) and a low-value exemption (Art. 16 — single payments under €30). This is the same decision engine as the 3D version, redrawn as its native object: a top-down pipeline diagram. Each dot is a transaction carrying a random amount (drawn from an exponential distribution around the average basket size — the standard model for retail transaction sizes); it travels left to right and is evaluated against the decision table the instant it crosses the vertical gate line. Transactions below the current threshold, on the whitelist, or under the low-value cutoff are routed into a frictionless lane (blue/purple/amber); everything else drops into the red lane and is held briefly at the spinning ring — a stand-in for the 3-D Secure / SCA challenge (device biometric, OTP or app approval) required by PSD2 Article 97. Raising the reference fraud rate narrows the TRA band and pushes more traffic into SCA — the real trade-off issuers manage between fraud loss and checkout friction.

Note: real low-value/TRA exemptions also track cumulative counts and amounts per payer over time (Art. 16, Art. 18(2)); this simulator, like the 3D source, applies the per-transaction threshold only, to keep the mechanism legible. The fraud-rate threshold table itself was checked against RTS Article 18 and carried over unchanged — no defect was found in it.

Drag the pipeline to pan, scroll/pinch to zoom — the same top-down view scales from a single lane out to the whole gate.

Risk-Based Authentication GateFrictionless lanes ↑ · SCA challenge lane ↓

drag to pan · scroll to zoom