Payment network Mastercard on Thursday launched CVC (Credit verification code)-less online transactions for its debit and credit cardholders who have tokenised their cards on merchant platforms.
CVC is the three-digit number printed on the back of debit and credit cards. According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s guidelines, merchants will collect CVC only once while tokenising the card.
From the second transaction onwards, cardholders will be required to select their tokenised card from the checkout page, confirm the one-time password and complete the transaction without entering the CVC.
On October 1, 2022, these regulations came into force. Several e-commerce companies like Cashfree Payments and Zomato have already adopted CVC-less payments. These CVC-less online transactions can help merchants garner benefits like higher authorisation rates, reduced checkout abandonment, and enhanced customer payment experience.
The announcement from Mastercard comes at a time when credit card usage in India has been on the uptrend. This has been aided by introducing features like RuPay credit card on unified payments interface.
While credit card spending fell 2.4% month-on-month to `1.37 trillion in June, it remained above the `1 trillion mark.
On the launch, Mastercard senior vice-president South Asia Anubhav Gupta said that CVC-less payments on tokenised cards make online domestic card payments smoother and safer.