451 Research's Global Unified Commerce Forecast projects online retail sales to expand to $5.8 trillion by 2022.

With this growth as the backdrop, let us explore how easy digital commerce is, especially the checkout experience. More often than not, the options provided can make it confusing for consumers.

You have a lot of choices, and you find it hard to choose among the fragmented, complex web of payment and technology providers.

This complexity creates an inconsistent customer experience, low conversion rates, and a disjointed approach to security, resulting in shopping cart abandonment.

The problem is not different for any one market or merchant size. A large retailer with a sophisticated checkout flow faces the same fragmentation problem as a smaller merchant using a third-party payment gateway.

The consumer experience varies from one merchant site to another, from one device to another, and from one payment network to another. There is no consistent signal that tells the customer they are in a safe, familiar checkout environment. That inconsistency is where conversion is lost.

The advent of SRC

To address uniformity in digital commerce payments, EMVCo has released the Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) specifications, and most major brands have voiced their support for it. They have slowly started rolling out their SRC checkouts.

The best part of SRC is the standard buy button that customers would see on the merchant's site or app. When you click the standard buy button and are authenticated, all the payment options the customer has already enrolled with their issuers will appear, and they can choose their preferred option.

Secure remote commerce adoption addresses the core problem of checkout fragmentation by providing every participating merchant with access to the same recognizable experience. The consumer does not need to learn a new checkout flow for each merchant.

The stored credentials, the buy button, and the authentication step remain the same regardless of where the transaction takes place. For merchants, it means higher conversion rates because customers are not seeing anything different.

However, for SRC to be successful, there must be an unprecedented level of collaboration among the various stakeholders. The stakeholders will be issuing banks, acquiring banks, payment gateways, payment networks, payment service providers, aggregators, digital wallets, digital commerce platforms, shopping carts, and app developers.

Let us look at some of the roles involved in SRC.

SRC roles and players

SRC initiator (SRCi) - securely retrieves payment card and shipping address data for the transaction. Acquirers, payment service providers, or aggregators will perform this role.

Digital Shopping Application (DSA) - the merchant's e-commerce shopping cart and e-commerce checkout page. App developers would do this.

SRC system - the core of the SRC implementation framework that orchestrates the flow between all participating roles. The payment networks would perform this role.

Digital Card Facilitator (DCF) - the entity that provides the consumer with secure storage of one or more digital cards with billing and shipping addresses to facilitate the checkout experience. Digital wallet providers would act as a DCF.

SRC Participating Issuer (SRCPI) - a card issuer that enrolls payment cards with each of the SRC systems and that authorizes the e-commerce transactions. Issuing banks will handle this.

SRC program - set of policies, procedures, and rules for governing and oversight of the SRC operation and participants. Payment networks will handle this.

SRC promotions - a fair bit of marketing spend will need to go towards onboarding merchants and consumers across payment networks.

SRC implementation challenges

Understanding the roles is straightforward. Getting all of those roles to work together in a live deployment is considerably harder.

A consumer clicking the buy button expects a seamless payment experience.

Behind that single click, a lot has to go right. The SRCi must retrieve credentials; the DSA must render the checkout correctly; the SRC system must orchestrate the flow; the DCF must return the stored card details; and the SRCPI must authorize the transaction.

Integration complexity is one of the more practical barriers for merchant SRCs.

Merchants, particularly smaller ones, depend on their payment gateway provider to implement SRC on their behalf. If the gateway has not yet completed its SRC integration, the merchant has no direct path to adoption, regardless of their own willingness to implement. The merchant's SRC readiness is therefore tied to the readiness of every provider in their stack.

Consumer enrolment is another barrier that is easy to underestimate. SRC works best when the consumer has already enrolled their cards with an SRC system through their issuer. A consumer who has not enrolled encounters a different, longer checkout experience on their first interaction. Getting consumers to enroll before they encounter SRC at checkout requires issuers to proactively promote enrollment, which adds a marketing and education burden that not all issuers have prioritized equally.

SRC payment adoption - what it will take

SRC payment adoption at scale requires progress on multiple fronts simultaneously. Payment networks need to complete their SRC system implementations and maintain them in accordance with the specifications.

Issuers need to enroll their cardholders and ensure their SRCPI participation is current. Acquirers and payment service providers need to integrate the SRCi function into their platforms. Merchants need their checkout providers to expose the buy button. App developers need to implement the DSA correctly.

None of these steps is technically impossible. Each one, in isolation, is a manageable integration project. The challenge is that they are interdependent. Progress on one front does not deliver value to the consumer until progress has also been made on the other fronts. That interdependency is why SRC, despite being a well-designed specification, takes time to reach the mainstream.

The marketing investment payment networks will need to make to promote SRC to both merchants and consumers is not trivial either. A standard buy button only becomes familiar when it is seen consistently across many merchant sites. Getting to that critical mass requires coordinated promotion and merchant onboarding that will take time and sustained effort.

All of these will have to work together. It is likely to be a few years before SRC becomes mainstream. However, it is a step in the right direction for bringing consistency and security to digital commerce payments. The fragmented checkout experience that costs merchants conversions today is a solvable problem. SRC is the industry's most coordinated attempt to solve it.