By Ben Sullivan
Visa Europe has expanded its tokenization service to support cloud payments from banks’ own mobile payment apps, as demand for paying with mobile devices increases.
The expansion of the company’s Visa Europe Payment Tokenization Service (VEPTS) allows banks and other organizations to integrate tokenization into services where payment details are stored on cloud, such as browser-based wallets, smartphones, and smartwatches.
“By 2020, our projections are for one in five consumers to pay for items using their smartphone on a daily basis and for payments on mobile or tablet to account for more than 50 percent of Visa transactions,” said Sandra Alzetta, Executive Director Product Enablement for Visa Europe.
Contactless
“Looking at contactless as an early indicator, where adoption has doubled and spend has trebled in the last year, we believe this projection could well be a conservative estimate,” she said.
The VEPTS expansion allows more vendors to operate in the payments ecosystem, from financial institutions to technology partners, all through one tokenization platform, said Visa.
Tokenization helps keep consumer card details relatively secure, regardless of how they make a payment by substituting a series of numbers—a token—for the actual account information so that wherever token data is stored, the underlying card details remain unexposed.
When consumers make a payment with a “tokenised” payment service, a token is submitted into the payment process, rather than the cardholder’s account details.
“By expanding our service to make tokenization available to our client banks through a number of new technology partners, consumers will have access to all manner of fantastic new payment experiences accessible through their mobile phones, tablets and all manner of other ‘connected’ devices,” said Alzetta.