“It could never be me!”
Unwise words are always said before whatever happens to us. So many of us are still hesitant when we put our card info online before purchasing. Now more so than ever! But now our worries are soon to be diminished after CBE's announcement of payment tokenization.
What is tokenization?
As much as we love online shopping and even though many of us trust the major e-commerce platforms, we still fear our info. may get stolen. But now, payment tokenization provides another layer to protect you from fraudsters. Tokenization is basically when a token service provider (Visa or Mastercard) replaces the sensitive payment data- such as your debit/credit card number- with a unique token that is of no value on its own.
How does it work?
Remember when we talked about payment gateway. Well, with payment tokenization, a token is generated by a third-party payment service provider, such as a payment gateway, Google Pay, Apple pay, etc.…. This way the data will only be stored with your payment service provider, not the seller. So, in case the seller gets hacked, your card info will be safe.
Pre-tokenization world
It seems like tokenization should have been used a long time ago. So, what type of protection did your cards have before it?
Encryption obviously! That means that if someone tried to hack your account or your bank, all they would see is a jumble of nonsense data. Fraud detection and prevention which basically means monitoring any weird transactions or using two-factor authentication to verify the identity of users.
