Global financial technology platform Adyen, has announced a major upgrade to its Authenticate offering, a part of its Adyen Uplift payment optimisation suite.
Authenticate now routes every transaction to the highest-performing authentication technology in real-time, while simultaneously optimising the data issuers use to approve transactions. This makes it easier for shoppers to complete purchases while removing the engineering and compliance overhead required by Adyen’s customers to maintain multiple authentication protocols in a fragmented ecosystem.
“Authentication is evolving from a regulatory checkpoint into a trust layer for digital commerce,” said Renan Renner, Group Product Manager for Adyen Uplift.
“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.
Authenticate is now live globally for 3DS and issuer optimisation. The platform supports next-generation authentication technologies, including Google SPA, Mastercard Payment Passkeys and Visa Payment Passkeys. In the UK, live transactions are already being enabled through these innovations, with further enhancements and global expansion planned through 2027.
Eliminating operational burden
Traditional online checkouts rely on static 3DS rules that treat every shopper the same, adding friction for legitimate customers and driving cart abandonment. Authenticate replaces those rules with three machine learning powered decisions on every transaction: whether authentication is needed, which method will perform best, and which data to share for the highest chance of issuer approval.
This is said to eliminate the operational burden of global expansion by combining real-time regulatory context with transaction, issuer, and shopper signals. Adyen’s customers no longer need to build or maintain complex, market-by-market authentication rules to stay compliant and maximise authorisation.
Established trust
Beyond speed and simplicity, Authenticate breaks the traditional trade-off between checkout friction and security. By leveraging Adyen’s network-wide risk signals, Authenticate recognises trusted shoppers before checkout.
In fact, for a retail merchant on the platform, there is more than a 90% chance that Adyen has seen their shopper before. When a good shopper is identified, Authenticate’s machine learning works natively with Adyen’s fraud management module, Protect, to trigger true risk-based authentication.
Challenges are applied only to transactions that genuinely need it, allowing legitimate customers to pass with minimal friction while authorised volume goes up.
Optimising payments
Authenticate intelligently selects between 3DS, Google Secure Payment Authentication (SPA), Mastercard Payment Passkeys, Visa Payment Passkeys, and data-only flows, routing each transaction to the method the shopper is most seamless and most likely to complete.
This intelligence is applied automatically to every eligible transaction, effectively reducing authentication friction and driving the 11% payment conversion uplift seen in early data. Authenticate is now live globally for 3DS and issuer optimisation. The platform supports next-generation authentication technologies, including Google SPA, Mastercard Payment Passkeys and Visa Payment Passkeys. In the UK, live transactions are already being enabled through these innovations, with further enhancements and global expansion planned through 2027.
