Tokenization is here to stay.
As a technology, it’s been around for a while and its use to secure payment card data has surged in recent years as mobile contactless payments have rolled out worldwide and online payments have cried out for additional security.
TOKENIZATION USE CASES
We’re not just talking about trials and pilots. EMVCo tokenization is already a de facto requirement for a number of card payment environments:
- card-on-file (at merchants);
- mobile near field communication (NFC) payments (any of the ‘OEM Pays’, and all forms of cloud based payments);
- secure remote payments in e-commerce/m-commerce.
So the question for most issuers is not ‘if’ to tokenize, but ‘where’ to tokenize. Banks need to implement in the most efficient and effective way to support their short, medium and long term goals.
PAYMENT TOKENIZATION IMPLEMENTATIONS
For US-based issuers involved in early payment industry tokenization initiatives, deployment options were very limited (or non-existent), since services were provided by the payment networks. We’re now seeing many issuers working to regain control of their cardholder payments processing and reap the rewards that autonomy brings.
Outside of the US, many issuers are strategically considering tokenization from day one. Time is short though, given the accelerating pace of global mobile NFC payments rollout, the increasing frequency of merchant data breaches and the growth in fraud in e/m-commerce payments.