Tokenization Of Credit Card Data

The method of tokenization works by substituting personalised data with other unique symbols that hold back all the necessary information without making it vulnerable to fraud attempts. It seeks to reduce the data quantity that a business has to keep. It has gained a lot of popularity. Small and medium sized businesses often reinforce the safety of the credit cards and other financial transactions. They also curb the cost and complications of the system with the standards maintained by the industries and rules laid down by the government.

How It Works?

The PCI, better known as the payment card industry has standards which do not permit the card numbers to be saved on a retailer’s POS terminal or even in the respective databases after a transaction is complete. In order to have compliance with the PCI, merchants need to set up costly encryption systems. They can also source the processing of their payment to the service provider who provides an option of tokenization. The service provider then looks into the provision of the token value. It is its responsibility to keep the cardholder data so that nobody can access it.

In such circumstances, the service provider supplies the merchant a driver that transforms the card numbers into values called tokens that are produced in a random fashion. The token cannot be utilized outside the context of a particular transaction with that particular merchant. In any transaction, for example, the token would contain only the four digits from the end of the original number on the card. The remaining digits comprise of alphabets and numbers that would represent the cardholder details.

Benefits Of Tokens

This technology makes it all the more tough for the hackers to gain access to the cardholder information in comparison to other older systems in which credit card numbers used to be saved in databases and shared openly over networks. This technology can be used with sensitive data of different kinds that involve bank transactions, medical records, vehicle driver details, loan applications, stock marketing, and voter registration details.

Presently, TOKENIZATION is used primarily in financial transaction environments to safeguard electronic, card based payments. The increasing popularity of this technology in this industry has led to a substantial growth in security and an overall reduction in compliance costs for organizations all over the world. The proven success of this technology has multiple applications in various industries and other sectors to secure all kinds of sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI).it is expected that more and more industries will slowly grasp the tangible benefits of this powerful and versatile technology.

Tokenization Or Encryption?

This method is much simpler in comparison to other technologies like encryption. But; the major advantage of this method lies in the fact that the original file cannot be decrypted at any cost as it does not hold any of the sensitive data. Thus it is an efficient way to protect the necessary information. Its storage needs are better and it is more transparent compared to other methods. Its performance has geared up over the past few years.

Smaller companies generally prefer TOKENIZATION over encryption. Here, the data in neither saved nor sent in its real form. This technology has proved to be the ideal ways to increase safety of the credit cards and at the same time reduce the complexity of industrial regulations. Thus, this approach is now accepted on a worldwide basis.