Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, today announced a major upgrade to its Authenticate offering, a part of its Adyen Uplift payment optimization suite. Authenticate now routes every transaction to the highest-performing authentication technology in real-time, while simultaneously optimizing 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.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. Authenticate can do this because unlike legacy 3D Secure (3DS) providers, Adyen operates as both the authentication provider and the acquirer. This position allows Authenticate's machine learning, trained on trillions of interactions, to learn from final authorization outcomes down the funnel, rather than authentication results alone.Authenticate eliminates 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 maximize authorization."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." Is authentication needed?Beyond speed and simplicity, Authenticate breaks the traditional trade-off between checkout friction and security. By leveraging Adyen’s network-wide risk signals, Authenticate recognizes 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 authorized volume goes up.Which authentication method will perform best?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. Newer authentication methods are integrated into one integration, keeping up with the speed of new technology in the authentication space without extra development work."Authenticate has transformed a static step in our checkout into a dynamic engine that gets better on its own," said Sander Kole, Fintech Engineering Director at Just Eat Takeaway.com. "With a single integration, we’ve been able to automatically streamline the payment flow and reduce friction for our customers, driving an 12% increase in payment conversion on the eligible traffic, without requiring ongoing maintenance." How are requests optimized for issuer acceptance?Authenticate dynamically optimizes the request itself. For example with 3DS, Authenticate evaluates more than 150 data fields and continuously learns which combinations of data points, values and signals are most likely to increase issuer approval, removing the authentication step or carrying it out silently. This intelligence is applied automatically to every eligible transaction, effectively reducing authentication friction and driving the 11% payment conversion uplift seen in early data.“Our payment conversion was already performing at a very strong level, so achieving a further 11% relative increase during the pilot is a meaningful result for us,” said Morten Keldebæk, CTO at Too Good To Go. “Authenticate is helping us reduce unnecessary friction while keeping authentication simpler to manage on our side. Ultimately, that means a smoother experience for our users and stronger payment performance for the business.”Authenticate is live globally today for 3DS and issuer optimization. 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.NoYesPayments22 Sep, 2026