Protecting Payment Integrity

Objective

The digital product team sought to expand its services into the EU market for leading payment network organization, capitalizing on international revenue growth while ensuring compliance with PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements. The primary objective was to enhance payment security, meet regulatory standards, and deliver a frictionless user experience.
Mr. Sunderajulu played a pivotal role in designing and architecting a cutting-edge payments platform for a leading payment network. His industry-leading expertise was instrumental in developing a scalable, secure payment tokenization solution with dynamic linking cryptogram that ensures consumer protection in both the U.S. and global markets.
Mr. Sunderajulu made significant original contributions to the payments industry. Leveraging his deep expertise, he developed digital and emerging payment specifications, defining product requirements for several major launches. Notably, he played a key role in introducing Secure Remote Commerce (Click-to-Pay), Contactless Payments, and Digital Payments—products that generated substantial revenue growth and reinforced the network’s leadership in the industry.

Key Initiatives & Solutions:
-TLS Encryption Integration: Implemented Transport Layer Security (TLS) to securely exchange tokenized payment credentials between merchants and payment processors via APIs, ensuring end-to-end encryption.
-Cryptogram Generation: Developed transaction-specific cryptograms incorporating merchant identity, token/PAN credentials, amount, transaction currency, and Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs). Additional attributes like Application Transaction Counter (ATC) and timestamps enabled risk-based validation, mitigating replay attacks.
-Encryption Standards: Adopted Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES) to ensure secure payload credentialing and data integrity.
-Host Security Module (HSM) Utilization: Integrated HSM commands to generate Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) authorization request cryptograms (ARQC), facilitating secure transaction processing and seamless compatibility with existing payment infrastructure.
-Risk-Based Validation: Leveraged ISO payment message fields to validate cryptogram uniqueness, amount, UUID, ATC, and merchant identity. Fraud prevention measures flagged potential replay attacks and duplicate transactions.

Outcome & Impact:
The implementation of these security enhancements enabled a secure, compliant and scalable expansion into the EU market by aligning with PSD2 SCA requirements, the solution strengthened payment security, minimized fraud risks & reduced chargebacks.