Credit Card Tokenization
To safeguard this sensitive data and comply with regulatory obligations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, TokenEx’s Cloud Security Platform utilizes cloud-based tokenization. By tokenizing with TokenEx, you can secure and desensitize cardholder data to comply with PCI DSS standards and virtually eliminate the risk of data theft.
What is Credit Card Tokenization?
Credit card tokenization is the process of de-identifying sensitive cardholder data by converting it to a string of randomly generated numbers called a “token.” Similar to encryption, tokenization obfuscates the original data to render it unreadable in the event of a data breach or other exposure.
Unlike encryption, however, credit card tokenization is irreversible, and tokenized credit card data can be stored inside an organization’s cardholder data environment without violating PCI DSS. It can also be deployed in a format- and length-preserving fashion to retain much of the business utility of the original, sensitive cardholder data. This enables organizations to operate with minimal disruptions to their existing business processes.
How Does Credit Card Tokenization Work?
TokenEx uses randomly generated data called tokens to tokenize a credit card, meaning the original, sensitive credit card data is removed from your environment and safely stored outside of it while a nonsensitive credit card token number is returned to you as a placeholder token for the credit card number. By swapping the credit card data, most commonly the primary account number (PAN), with a token, you’re relieving yourself of the need to store customer credit cards in your internal systems. From there, you can send credit card data to any endpoint via our patented, processor-agnostic Transparent Gateway.
How Do Businesses Benefit From Credit Card Tokenization?
Businesses benefit significantly from credit card tokenization through a third-party platform Cloud-based tokenization allows a business to safeguard their sensitive data and ensure compliance with stringent regulatory standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). By utilizing tokenization services, businesses can:
- Securely desensitize cardholder data and effectively reduce the risk of data theft
- Comply with PCI DSS requirements, while reducing compliance scope and effort
- Maximize the internal use of their data without adding risk or compliance complications.
Additionally, if a business chooses to tokenize with TokenEx, they gain the ability to connect with any third party, avoiding vendor lock-in. The flexibility to use multiple processors and endpoints further enhances the adaptability and security of businesses utilizing tokenization services.
Does Credit Card Tokenization Help With PCI DSS Requirements?
Credit card tokenization plays a crucial role in aiding businesses with PCI DSS requirements. The TokenEx platform is purpose-built to lower the cost and complexity associated with PCI compliance. Leveraging credit card tokenization allows businesses to remove sensitive cardholder data from internal systems, securely storing it outside their environment. Additionally, TokenEx employs data minimization and Zero Trust security principles to achieve maximum PCI scope reduction and virtually eliminate the risk of data theft.
Credit and Debit Card Tokenization Examples
Merchants and other organizations that use web stores or online applications to accept payments can benefit from IXOPAY's ecommerce tokenization. We offer a special Ecommerce Package featuring the IXOPAY iFrame and our patented Transparent Gateway designed to minimize PCI compliance scope specifically for these customers.
For ecommerce acceptance channels, we use our iFrame to collect cardholder data directly from the fields of your checkout page, minimizing risk and the scope of PCI DSS compliance by preventing it from ever entering your cardholder data environment. Because we use the iFrame to ingest the data, you can use tokenization alongside credit card processing while maintaining the look and feel of your website’s checkout page.
Organizations can use IXOPAY to tokenize cardholder data captured from mobile applications on Android or iOS devices. Whether these applications are native or web-based, we can collect the credit card data traversing them and securely tokenize it for risk reduction and industry compliance. Similar to the way we tokenize credit card data from ecommerce entry points, IXOPAY captures credit card information from browsers using either the iFrame or browser-based encryption. From there, data is tokenized and stored as it would be regardless of the acceptance channel.
For native mobile applications, TokenEx enables the tokenization of credit card data with its Mobile API. IXOPAY's Mobile API allows customers to send credit card and other sensitive data captured from the device using their mobile applications to IXOPAY to be tokenized and safely stored. With our Mobile API solution, we can offer comprehensive mobile tokenization.
Call centers are popular stations for providing customer service and for accepting payments over the phone. These centers use technology such as point-to-point encryption (P2PE), interactive voice response (IVR), and dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) to ingest payment card information. TokenEx can integrate with these technologies to tokenize sensitive payment data and remove the credit card information from the systems downstream from the call center environment. This relieves the organization from storing sensitive credit card data in its internal systems and reduces its overall compliance scope.
Remove sensitive credit card data from your environment
“We never touch any payment data in our contact centers, retail stores, websites, or in the field. That’s a big relief.”