eftpos is bringing large-scale payments competition to Australia’s online retailer sector from November with a range of additional security features available to the payments industry.

The new features mean eftpos online transactions including Least Cost Routing (LCR), will enter the market with significantly less risk to traditional security vulnerabilities that currently cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

These new features are part of the $100 million spent on eftpos’ digital upgrade over five years and come in addition to other secure digital payments initiatives including QR code payments experience infrastructure, mobile wallet functionality and a digital identity service, connectID.

eftpos CEO Stephen Benton said consumers and online retailers using eftpos in the online environment will start to be protected by state-of-the-art fraud scoring capabilities from November, as well as the availability of additional security features including eftpos Secure (3D Secure) two factor authentication functionality and eftpos tokenisation services.

“eftpos would expect ecommerce to be enabled by all of its financial institution members by May 2022, in line with mandates that were issued earlier this year. Most of the enablement work has already been done,” he said.

“These new services mark an exciting turning point for eftpos, online Australian businesses and the Digital Economy because banks and financial institutions will be able to offer their customers competitive debit card payments services in areas of the Australian economy that currently suffer from a complete lack of competition and high costs.

“This is a game changer for eftpos and Australian retailers because retail is quickly transforming to become an increasingly digital marketplace, accelerated by COVID.”

The new eftpos Secure (3DS) certifications from Outseer and Arcot, payment security division of Broadcom covers most Australian banks, including the Big Four, in parallel with progress with CardinalCommerce, GPayments and other partners supporting some major merchants and payment service providers.