EMVCo has officially released its SRC standards — and card networks are jumping onboard

Digital checkout can be stressful for consumers, as they're confronted with a plethora of payment options.And that fragmentation is compounded by the need to reenter payment and shipping information, which disproportionately impacts customers buying on mobile devices with smaller screens and slower connections.

SRC aims to solve this by standardizing processes similar to how consumers have the same experience paying with cards across different stores ultimately improving the consumer experience, which can lead to increased sales for merchants and an uptick in volume for back-end payments players.

US giants are quickly seeking out ways to implement SRC upon its release.

Mastercard announced the Digital Wellness Program, which leverages the standard.The service is targeted at small businesses and leans on SRC to enable a standardized checkout experience that is device- and payment method-agnostic. It also offers sellers tokenization and AI-based fraud prevention capabilities, and eliminates the need for password entry before checkout. Mastercard plans to roll out the suite to merchants next quarter, and its partner roster includes big-name providers like Adyen, Square, Stripe, and Worldpay.
Amex and Discover have offerings in the works as well.Discover stated it has a solution it will bring to market "later this year." And Amex said it's in the "final stages of making SRC a reality," with plans to enable support in several interoperable SRC solutions. Broad deployment of the platform early on could lead to rapid uptick at scale among sellers and consumers alike, allowing providers to realize the benefits of improved conversions quickly.

The bigger picture: SRC isn't designed to compete with one-click checkout solutions, but it could ultimately diminish some of their advantages.

PayPal, for example, which offers Express Checkout and One Touch, among other checkout solutions, designed its products to enable check out without the need to reenter payment and shipping credentials. These services work: PayPal products count an 88.7% completion rate, far above the 55.3% average of other digital wallets, and nearly double the 48.7% overall completion rate for e-commerce purchases.

But in elevating the default standard for e-commerce, SRC will enable many of those advantages by default, which could reduce some of the core benefits of digital wallets from partners and potentially threaten their dominance over the space.

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