Mastercard Moves to Expand Usage of Tokenized Card Credentials
PURCHASE, N.Y.—With analysts predicting digital payment adoption could represent 20%-30% of consumer payments by 2020, Mastercard said it is taking steps to help spread the use of the tokenized card credentials.
In October of 2014, Mastercard launched its tokenization service, MDES (Mastercard Digital Enablement Service). MDES streamlines FIs’ enrollment in mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay. The service also improve access to Mastercard token services and connects issuers to current and future wallet providers of the issuer’s choice without the need to directly contract the wallet providers.
“Since then, demand from our customers has been extremely strong – with almost 700 issuers around the globe now connected to MDES. And with these digitized and tokenized card credentials now available to us, our banks and merchants, Mastercard is designing rich, innovative, compelling and secure ways to pay across all channels and devices, redefining commerce globally,” said James Anderson, executive vice president, digital payment products, Mastercard.
This past summer, Mastercard started to tokenize Mastercard credentials into Masterpass, the company’s digital wallet service.
“To continue to drive the wider adoption of tokens – an effort supported by both our bank and merchant partners – we recently signed an agreement with Visa that will accelerate the adoption of tokens in Masterpass and Visa Checkout,” said Anderson. “The reciprocal tokenization agreement allows Visa to request tokenized Mastercard payment credentials from Mastercard for provisioning into Visa Checkout, and for Mastercard to request tokenized Visa credentials from Visa for provisioning into Masterpass.”
By allowing each network’s respective wallet service to leverage the token solutions of the other network, this agreement will ensure that each network’s wallet solutions can continue to stay open – and can add the extra security of using tokens in place of real card numbers, explained Anderson.
“We’ve seen a fantastic response to Masterpass from both banks and merchants alike, and see this agreement as another positive development in the product’s continued adoption,” he said.