ARCOT INTELLIGENCE | 3-D Secure in the AI Era

In this episode, Matt Cooke, General Manager of Arcot, the Payment Security Division at Broadcom, shares key insights from the recent 3DS Summits in Dublin and London. The Summits focus on industry-wide collaboration that drives mutual revenue growth. Central to this is data-sharing. When merchants pass 3-D Secure data downstream, issuers make significantly better decisions. Matt explores how the adaptive, auto decisioning of Arcot Smart Ruleset and the new Arcot Scam Defense – designed to stop card-not-present social engineering – both leverage this data to power more accurate, real-time transaction decisioning. Using a medieval castle analogy, he illustrates why authentication must stand as the outer wall before authorization, wrapping up with a forward look at passkeys and the future of agentic payments.

The rules of e-commerce are changing fast, and payment authentication has never been more critical. In Episode 51, Broadcom Payment Security executives break down how to balance fraud prevention with a frictionless user experience to drive revenue growth. We dive into the rise of autonomous AI shopping agents on platforms like Meta and Shopify, the unique challenge of authenticating non-human actors, and what it all means for the future of 3-D Secure. Plus: how to use frontier AI for proactive cyber defense, rapid-fire takes on Delegated Auth and Passkeys, and a sneak peek at our upcoming payments summits in Dublin and London.

In our latest podcast episode, Arcot General Manager Matt Cooke previews our upcoming October 3-D Secure Summits in London and Dublin. He breaks down the massive shift in merchant perception of 3-D Secure, driven by scheme incentives, lower interchange fees, and the ecosystem's need for data-sharing to eliminate false declines and recover lost revenue. Scheme updates are building a more secure set of rails for safe transactions, supporting his view that data beats friction. Cooke likens payment authentication, the most effective defense against digital payment fraud, to an "outer castle wall," blocking fraud before it reaches "the inner castle wall" of authorization. Looking ahead, the team explores social engineering countermeasures like Arcot's secondary risk assessment and the future impact of automated AI purchasing agents.

In this episode, Matt Cooke, General Manager of Arcot, the Payment Security Division of Broadcom, shares his insights on the key findings and strategic recommendations from the inaugural Arcot Payments Report. While 3-D Secure (3DS) has long been used to prevent fraud, this report reveals how 3DS transaction insights can help customers, partners, and processors optimize their own strategies to improve payment outcomes, eliminate unnecessary buyer friction, and drive revenue growth. Download the full report at brcm.tech/Arcot2026PaymentsReport.

Explore the evolution of the Arcot business into Broadcom’s Payment Security Division, and its core mission to make 3-D Secure work better. We dive into the rapid advancements of the EMV 3-D Secure protocol and why the Arcot Smart Ruleset is becoming the industry standard for reducing fraud and improving operational performance. We pull back the curtain on our security infrastructure, featuring our deployment of frontier AI, and examine how Arcot's Secondary Risk Evaluation is now embedded into the challenge flow to stop social engineering fraud. Plus, we look toward the future as agentic payments take center stage while AI bots begin executing transactions. Ready to stay ahead of the curve? Head over to arcot.com for our latest briefs, white papers, scorecards, and tech resources.

Arcot leverages advanced AI and machine learning to maximize real-time fraud detection and minimize consumer friction by pairing its 25-year global data network and proprietary risk scoring algorithm, the RAN Score, with the automated, dynamic Arcot Smart Ruleset. This powerful combination outperforms static, human-managed rules, delivering superior ROI through massive fraud loss savings and operational efficiency. To outsmart increasingly sophisticated fraudsters, leadership emphasizes the critical need for businesses to “skate where the puck is going” and urgently internalize AI at scale. By leveraging frontier AI, Arcot delivers the cutting-edge security essential for safeguarding clients against the digital instability ahead.

In this episode, we dive into Visa’s new Data Contribution Authentication Program (DCAP) and why it marks a "step change" for the 3-D Secure (3DS) ecosystem in the US and beyond. We explore how merchants are now leveraging 3DS Data-Share-Only (DSO) transactions to secure reduced interchange fees. Evidence of 3DS adoption appears in the data: 3DS volumes on the Arcot Network rose between 100% and 160% year-over-year in just one week. We dive into why more data leads to better issuer decisioning, higher approval and authorization rates, and a significant reduction in chargebacks - citing real-world results like the 6% chargeback drop seen in the Square case study. AI and the Arcot Smart Ruleset are becoming essential tools for issuers to defend against increasingly sophisticated fraudsters using LLMs to target payment vulnerabilities. Tune into this podcast to hear how the shift from using 3DS for high-risk transaction volumes to using it as a protocol for data-sharing is creating a more secure, efficient, and profitable landscape for both merchants and issuers.

Data is at the core of everything Arcot does. Sitting at the heart of the 3-D Secure (3DS) ecosystem, The Arcot Network captures industry-wide intelligence. Arcot shares these insights -- from emerging global fraud trends down to granular, peer-to-peer benchmarking -- to empower smarter payment routing and better outcomes. Today, merchants routing transactions directly to authorization without accompanying data face staggering 15-20% decline rates. Fresh off the heels of MRC Vegas, Arcot is championing U.S. "data-only" adoption to fix this. The continuous flow of rich data strengthens risk-based authentication and fraud defenses, powers the automated fraud savings of The Arcot Smart Ruleset, improves authorization rates, and ultimately makes digital shopping smarter and safer for everyone. The Arcot Smart Ruleset has moved from hypothesis to proof with large issuers seeing $1m+ in annualized fraud savings. In the AI superintelligence era, the best models and the fastest adopters win. Tune in to learn more.

3D Secure is well-suited for the AI superintelligence era, as a layer that can process what humans simply cannot. Shifting from basic scoring to models that rapidly analyze transactions that are full of rich and complete meta data, The Arcot Network uses billions of data points to deliver automated fraud savings measured in the millions with The Arcot Smart Ruleset. Arcot is bridging the divide between merchants and issuers through 3DS data and fraud rule automation to deliver real results. Tune in to learn more.

Kick off 2026 by discovering how 3D Secure has evolved into a standard for global eCommerce payment security. Host Matt Cooke likens the protocol to the security chip on a physical credit card, but purpose-built for eCommerce payments. Learn how mega-merchants are leveraging 3DS data-only experiments and smart routing to raise approval rates without adding customer friction. Updates on the Arcot Smart Ruleset reveal that automated fraud detection is delivering millions and millions of dollars in fraud savings to issuers on the Arcot Network; those that are not using automated fraud detection are leaving revenue on the table. Discover why SMS authentication is finally hitting its "magstripe moment" and why in-app biometrics are the non-negotiable future of secure payments. Tune in to master the art of "closing the loop" between authentication and authorization to maximize revenue and security in the year ahead.