US payments infrastructure company Stripe has acquired Irish software company Touchtech Payments in preparation for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) regulations in Europe.

Touchtech provides advanced SCA-ready authentication technology for FinTechs and challenger banks like N26, Transferwise and others.

“On the modern internet, payments should be everything you’d expect: easy, secure, and fully compliant with the latest regulations,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s chief product officer.

“Touchtech adds yet another layer to the economic infrastructure Stripe is building for the internet, which is designed to help businesses comply not only with SCA, but also with the entire next generation of regional payment regulations.”

As part of Stripe, Touchtech will continue to grow its products, working from the existing Dublin engineering hub.

On 14 September, SCA will come into force in Europe, radically changing the way people buy and sell online, with more than 300 million European consumers needing to confirm their identity for the majority of their online purchases, using passwords and biometrics.

Stripe pointed out that hundreds of thousands of European online merchants - from retailers, to ridesharing companies, to crowdfunding services - will have to upgrade their payments setup to prepare for the upcoming regulation.

The company has therefore announced new products and updates to help merchants implement the best SCA-ready authentication methods to checkout pages and dynamically trigger SCA when required. The new Payment Intents API lets businesses design their own SCA-ready payment forms, and accept the best authentication methods - 3D Secure 2, Apple Pay, Google Pay - through a single integration.

It has also developed Checkout, a pre-built payments page optimised for SCA, that merchants can integrate with just a few lines of code.

Dynamic support for SCA exemptions on low-risk transactions will also be rolled-out, with Stripe dynamically scanning every transaction to trigger SCA only when required, protecting both users’ safety and merchants’ revenue.

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