From Wednesday 7th April, the way we verify your identity when making a payment with your K Ring is changing. These changes are designed to reduce the risk of someone pretending to be you to steal your money.
What is Strong Customer Authentication exactly?
Authentication is the process we use to establish that it’s really you using your K Ring and, in line with industry regulations, we’ve implemented Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) to increase the security of your K Ring transactions.
SCA ensures that whichever way you choose to pay, authentication of your identity is based on the use of two or more elements, categorised as:
- Knowledge (something only you know)
- Possession (something only you possess)
- Inherence (something you are)
Chip and PIN card transactions already have what would be deemed strong customer authentication (with the chip providing “Possession” and the PIN providing “Knowledge” authentication) but the same does not generally hold true for contactless payments, which rely on the single authentication factor of “Possession”.
With the increase of the contactless transaction limit to £100 in the UK, there is also an increase in the potential for fraud, which SCA has been designed to help limit.
So how does SCA affect your use of K Ring?
With SCA, we must authenticate your identity when either one of two conditions is met:
- You make a series of consecutive transactions up to a value of £135 / €150, or.
- You make 5 consecutive transactions – of any value
We want to minimise disruption as much as possible when you’re using your K Ring, so when either of these two conditions is met you simply need to log in to your account to complete your authentication. This action recognises the first factor – Knowledge – using your account username and password. The second factor – Possession – is recognised by the fact that the previous series of consecutive transactions were made with your K Ring.
Logging into your account lets us know that it’s you using your K Ring, and resets the authentication counter. You can log in to reset your counter at any time – you don’t have to wait until you are prompted.
How will you know when you need to authenticate your identity?
With your permission, we’ll send an alert to your phone* when you have two transactions left and one transaction left before you have to authenticate your identity.
If you reach – or exceed – £90 of transactions since your last authentication, we’ll also alert you to this, asking you to log into your account for authentication again.
You’ll be able to control which authentication alerts you receive in your account Settings, which makes it easy to avoid having your K Ring declined for not having authenticated your identity.
We hope this explains Strong Customer Authentication and how it works with K Ring, but if you have any questions, please let us know by emailing us at support@myKring.com
*Alerts delivered via SMS or via the K Ring app, available for iOS and Android from July 2021