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Visa Inc. is banking big on its Visa Token Service with the addition of 20 acquirer, gateway, and technology companies signing up to offer the network token.
The card brand Wednesday announced the additions, called requestors because they request tokens for the credit and debit cards processed through their systems. The total number of requestors globally is 60, William Levaggi, Visa vice president of digital payment products, tells Digital Transactions News.
The latest companies include the likes of Adyen, Braintree, CyberSource (which Visa owns), Elavon, Giesecke & Devrient, PayPal, Square, Payscout, Stripe, and Worldpay. They are be able to tokenize card-on-file payments for their merchant and payment clients.
Launched in 2014, the Visa Token Service scrambles the actual card data into a digital string that is useless to fraudsters. It remains a no-cost service to clients, Levaggi says.
Levaggi says Visa’s token can work in conjunction with other tokens, such as those an acquirer or gateway may issue. “I see both working together,” Levaggi says. The gateway can continue to use their token with merchants, but Visa’s network token would be used on the backend, he says. When the Visa token is updated following a card update, such as replacing a lost or stolen card or an expired one, the gateway token could be automatically updated, too, he says.
Visa expects this batch of new token users to greatly expand the use of tokens, especially for card-on-file transactions. “These 20 partners will be critical in the e-commerce expansion,” Levaggi says.
Tokenization is not a new product within the payments industry, but it gathered a lot more attention once services, like mobile payments, adopted the technology. Earlier this year, Visa launched the Token Management Service, which makes it easier for users to manage their tokenized payment card data from multiple sources and across multiple channels. This is viewed as vital as tokenized card data becomes used more in mobile and in-store environments.
Visa and Mastercard Inc., both of which offer tokenization services, almost two years ago agreed on a reciprocity pact to access the other network’s token engine.
Visa has steadily announced additions to its token service. In September, Rambus Inc. said its token gateway for e-commerce was certified by the Visa Ready Program, the company’s certification service.
Levaggi, naturally, foresees greater use of tokenization, especially for card-on-file transactions. “I see that as the spearhead of digital transactions in the future.”
Other new Visa token users are AsiaPay, Checkout.com, Cherri Tech, Ezidebit, eWAY, Fit-Pay, SafeCharge, SecureCo, and YellowPepper.
