Visa Acquires CardinalCommerce

Visa announced today that it will acquire eCommerce payment authentication leader CardinalCommerce. The move is expected to enable Visa’s global clients and partners to accelerate, scale and secure digital commerce as payments expands to include billions upon billions of connected endpoints.

Mark Nelsen, senior vice president of risk and authentication products at Visa, said that the “strategic acquisition combines Visa’s industry expertise and Cardinal’s critical role in payment authentication to bring added security to online transactions, reduce fraud and support digital commerce — which is the fastest growing commerce segment today.”

The combination of Visa’s global network and Cardinal’s authentication platform will give merchants and issuers an end-to-end view of the transaction regardless of where it originates — reducing the risk of fraud to merchants and issuers and the friction consumers can often encounter when transacting online.

Additionally, as Visa plans to integrate tokenization into Visa Checkout over the next 18 months, the acquisition of Cardinal will allow merchants a more seamless integration and delivery of the recently released 3-D Secure 2.0 fraud protection protocol. 3-D Secure 2.0 is an XML-based security protocol that enables consumer cards to be authenticated during card-not-present transactions. Authentication can also extend to when consumers link payment cards to digital wallets and can enable borderless commerce.

“We are excited to embark on this next chapter of Cardinal’s growth with Visa,” said Mike Keresman, founder and CEO of CardinalCommerce. “By combining our authentication expertise and role in supporting both merchants and issuers and Visa’s payments expertise and global reach, our two companies will be able to fast-track the next generation of digital authentication.”

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. CardinalCommerce will continue to operate under its own brand name. The deal is expected to close sometime in Visa’s second fiscal quarter of 2017.