PURCHASE, N.Y.—The Clearing House (TCH) and Mastercard announced they are partnering to enable TCH to provision and manage Mastercard-branded tokens on behalf of banks.
The partnership with Mastercard establishes TCH as one of the first Mastercard-certified third-party Token Service Providers to enter the U.S. market, and enables TCH to support current and future token capabilities ranging from mobile payments to remote purchases and Internet-of-things (IoT) transactions, according to the organizations.
The Clearing House has been a long-time participant in tokenization. The Clearing House’s tokenization solution conforms with the card industry’s EMVCo framework and fully complies with the Mastercard Token Service Provider Standards, which were initially published in August 2016. This agreement paves the way for TCH to offer fully compliant tokens that transact over the Mastercard network. The partnership builds on Mastercard’s desire to support a robust token ecosystem and enable issuer optionality for services, Mastercard said.
“The safety and security of payments is paramount to TCH and our owner banks, and was a core rationale for our initial token work stemming back several years.” said Dave Fortney, executive vice president, product development and strategy, at The Clearing House. “We are excited to partner with Mastercard to provide issuer optionality and functionality for token services.”
“In the digital age, where all connected devices are becoming commerce devices, we must make security a core focus,” said Sherri Haymond, executive vice president, Digital Partnerships, Mastercard. “Through this partnership, banks that issue Mastercard-branded cards now have the choice to tokenize their customers’ accounts through TCH, providing their customers digital payments options that offer the same safety, security, rights and benefits as accounts tokenized by Mastercard.”
The Clearing House will launch its card tokenization solution in the next quarter, and is in the process of extending tokenization to other networks it manages, including Real-Time Payments (RTP).