Adyen upgrades Authenticate to lift online payments

Adyen has upgraded its Authenticate product for online payments, saying the update can deliver double-digit conversion gains for merchants.

The revised service routes each transaction in real time to what Adyen describes as the best-performing authentication method. It also adjusts the information sent to card issuers to improve the chances of approval. The product is part of Adyen's Uplift payments optimisation suite.

Authentication sits at the centre of many online card payments, particularly in markets where merchants must comply with strong customer authentication rules. Retailers have long relied on fixed 3D Secure settings, which can add extra steps for genuine customers and increase the risk of abandoned baskets.

Adyen says its system replaces those static rules with three machine-learning decisions on every transaction: whether authentication is required, which method to use, and which data to include in the request. The model draws on historical issuer behaviour and shopper preferences.

The group has integrated several authentication routes into the product, including 3DS, Google Secure Payment Authentication, Mastercard Payment Passkeys, Visa Payment Passkeys, and data-only flows. That gives merchants access to newer authentication approaches through a single integration, rather than requiring separate deployments for each protocol.

How it works

A central part of Adyen's pitch is that it acts as both the authentication provider and the acquirer in the payment chain. That gives it visibility into final authorisation outcomes, allowing its models to learn from whether a payment ultimately succeeded rather than from the authentication stage alone.

The system has been trained on trillions of interactions, according to Adyen. The service also combines regulatory context with transaction, issuer, and shopper signals, so merchants do not need to maintain market-by-market authentication rules to remain compliant.

Adyen linked the update to a broader shift in digital commerce, as businesses try to reduce checkout friction without weakening fraud controls. One of the long-running tensions in payments is that extra verification can reduce fraud but also deter legitimate customers from completing a purchase.

Authenticate works with Adyen's fraud management product, Protect, to apply risk-based authentication when a trusted shopper is identified. According to the company, for a retail merchant on its platform there is more than a 90% chance it has seen the shopper before, allowing the system to decide when a challenge is unnecessary.

That approach is intended to limit additional checks to transactions that genuinely need them. In practice, some payments can move through with little visible interruption for the customer, while others are directed to stronger verification methods where needed.

Partner support

Google, Mastercard, and Visa are among the partners involved in the launch. Their inclusion reflects a wider push across the payments industry to move beyond conventional passwords and one-time passcodes toward passkey-based and token-based authentication methods.

Authenticate also changes the content of the authentication request itself, Adyen said. In the case of 3DS, it evaluates more than 150 data fields and uses that analysis to determine which combinations of values and signals are most likely to support issuer approval.

Adyen's early figures point to an 11% uplift in payment conversion. While it did not identify the size of the trial group behind that number, the company presents the gain as evidence that merchants can reduce friction without giving up control over compliance and fraud screening.

For merchants operating internationally, authentication remains a fragmented part of the checkout stack. Different card schemes, local rules, and issuer preferences often require separate configurations, adding engineering and operational work for retailers expanding into new markets.

Adyen says the latest version of Authenticate is designed to absorb more of that complexity within a single platform. Rather than asking merchants to choose one authentication standard for all transactions, the system selects the route on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

"Authentication is evolving from a regulatory checkpoint into a trust layer for digital commerce," said Sander Meijers, Canada Country Manager at Adyen.

"The future is not about choosing one protocol, but knowing when and how to use the right mechanism for each transaction. Authenticate is built to make that decision in context, helping turn authentication into a contributor to payment success rather than another step at checkout," Meijers said.