Prague – 10 December 2018 – Based on reports, a new fight is brewing between merchants and card companies as major card networks Visa and MasterCard are requiring online merchants from hi-risk industries to present legal opinions from IMGL and STEP accredited local lawyers in jurisdictions in which they operate.

This also comes with a new technical framework for online transactions, which these two major companies are backing from their jointly owned EMVCo specifications group. This is amid growing competition for mobile and other digital payments and lackluster take up of the networks’ respective online digital wallets, Visa Checkout and MasterPass.

Visa has persuaded payment firms CyberSource, Adyen, Rambus, G+D Mobile Security, SecureCo, Ezidebit, eWay, and Bambora to sign up to its credential-on-file (COF) tokenization technology, acting as gateways to connect to the Visa Token Service. The switch – which will remove the need for online merchants to store their customers’ payment details in their own systems – will come into effect over the next few months, and will roll out worldwide.

MasterCard has said it plans to start rolling out new tokenization and authentication services through its EMVCo Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) framework in the second half of 2019, with the company aiming to enable token services on all cards by 2020.