Cashfree Payments is excited to announce that we are introducing a CVV-free card payments experience on the checkout for our customers. This experience is designed to provide a faster, smoother, and more convenient payment experience while continuing to maintain the highest level of security.
The removal of CVV entry from the payments experience is expected to reduce payment failures by up to 10% while making the checkout process up to 5 seconds faster for customers using Visa, MasterCard, or Rupay debit and credit cards.
What are CVV-Free Card Payments?
Card Verification Value (CVV) is a 3 or 6-digit number found at the back of a credit or debit card, which is used to verify the cardholder for card-based digital payments, whether or not the card in question had been saved on that business’ checkout. This manual entry requirement often leads to 5-10% of failed credit and debit card payments when the CVV is incorrectly entered.
The removal of CVV entry from the payments experience is expected to reduce payment failures by up to 10% and make the checkout process up to 4-5 seconds faster for customers using Visa, MasterCard, or Rupay cards. This will allow users to make transactions on their favorite websites and applications where their cards are saved without having to refer to their cards, and with minimized risk of payment failure and friction.
Who is Relevant for CVV-Free Card Payments?
Cashfree Payments has worked closely with our partners at Visa, MasterCard, and NPCI to ensure that this solution is available to all saved cards on either of these networks. This will enable ~77Mn credit card and ~850Mn debit card users to get a smooth and simple payment experience once their cards have been tokenized.
All Cashfree Payments gateway customers using our Token Vault solution will be able to use our CVV-free payments flow, especially if they are currently using our hosted checkout or SDKs. In case they are using our PG infrastructure, via a seamless API-based integration, they will need to remove the flow which asks for CVV before triggering the create order API.
Why Does This Matter?
Credit card and debit card users are the most valuable customers for most digital businesses, as they tend to have the highest spending and consumption patterns in India. Credit card holders constitute ~70% of the 65 million active monthly digital spenders in India, and spending on credit cards is increasing at a rate of 24-25% every year – second only to UPI, where the value is increasing because of an increase in UPI usage.
Retaining and delighting these customers is critical to all businesses with a significant volume of their business originating online since they contribute a substantial proportion of all payments volume in India today. These are the most regular and high-spending users that digital businesses are catering to. CVV-free payments are also an effective way to reduce the friction currently experienced by cardholders using digital payments, and bring their payment experience more in line with other payment modes such as UPI Intent.
CVV-Free Flow: The Ideal State of Card Payments
The RBI has rightfully been concerned about the security and privacy of customers leveraging their debit or credit cards to conduct P2M (Person to Merchant) transactions. Despite some naysayers, the Indian payments ecosystem was safeguarded in its early stage by the RBI’s insistence on 2-factor authentication (2FA), which helped ensure that even if debit or credit card numbers or CVVs were lost, malicious actors would not be able to use this information to make fraudulent payments. The RBI’s decision here was proven right when millions of Indian customers’ card information was leaked in data breaches happening to businesses and payment providers.
We saw this cycle repeated again when the RBI issued its card tokenization guidelines, taking their reasonable caution one step further to safeguard Indian consumers. These guidelines ensured that only the card networks and Indian banks would be able to save the actual card information – payment intermediaries and businesses would only be allowed to save card tokens. Once again, there were naysayers insisting that having these safeguards in addition to 2FA would make card payments slower and add friction.
However, with CVV-free payments, we can realize a new reality in which card payments are extremely smooth while being completely safe. CVV-free payments provide a faster and equally secure alternative to traditional card payments with CVV entry and 2FA. As such, this new feature ensures that Indian e-commerce and digital payments are kept safer in the long term and that customers and businesses are provided with the kind of digital capabilities they need to grow to help India achieve its economic goals.
Why Choose Cashfree Payments?
Cashfree Payments has the industry’s best and only PA/PG-led interoperable tokenization solution, offering greater flexibility while ensuring complete compliance with the existing RBI norms. For the end-user, Cashfree’s best-in-class checkout experience ensures customer satisfaction as well as the highest possible success rates with input validations to prevent manual errors. Now, with CVV-free payments, the payment experience becomes faster and smoother, making Cashfree’s checkout flow even more seamless.
But wait – there’s more! Cashfree Payments also leverages dynamic real-time routing which delivers 5-10% higher success rates by using an advanced AI/ML algorithm to avoid downtimes and deliver a successful payments experience. To further improve success rates, Cashfree Payments has also built a new feature that allows for payment retries without user intervention on card payments – essentially, in the instance where the payment has failed, the payment will be re-routed to other terminals. This ensures that the end-customer experience is failure-free, while our partner businesses get the most value out.
If you are interested in offering CVV-free payments, click on this link and provide us with some details about your business. We will reach out to you and get you started on the industry’s smoothest and fastest card payments experience.
