Visa has announced that it has issued its 1 billionth token as part of a continued push to make payments more secure. The Visa Token Service (VTS) replaces a cardholder’s 16-digit Visa account number with a secure token, designed to protect the underlying card number from fraudsters.
With the huge rise in digital payments, which has been exacerbated due to the recent coronavirus crisis, the demand for more secure and non-contact payment systems has never been higher. This has resulted in the rapid adoption of Visa’s token technology.
Quoting data pulled from the Retail Systems Research Consumer Report in March, the company revealed that 90% of shoppers are now hesitant to shop in physical stores and 45% claim that online shopping is now an everyday necessity.
Growing digital payments
Meanwhile, information from Statista’s ‘Number of digital buyers worldwide’ report reveals that digital customers are expected to hit 2.1 billion globally by 2021. Visa therefore says that its tokenisation technology, along with its click to pay experience will play an increasingly vital role in strengthening digital payment security around the world. Often displayed as a button, click to pay eliminates the need to create passwords and manually type card details during website transactions.
VisaNet merchant data has revealed that as more merchants and retailers adopt the VTS technology it is also accelerating its credential-on-file (COF) efforts, where cardholder’s allow merchants to store their payment details for ongoing transactions. Visa says that as of today there are over 13,000 merchants transacting with its COF tokens. There are also over 8,200 issuers enabled on the Visa Token Service from 150 markets.
“The world’s massive shift to digital underscores the need for easy and secure digital commerce, which is why we’ve seen such an increase in the number of tokens issued by Visa Token Service,” said Ansar Ansari, senior vice president, digital payment products, Visa.
“In the last 12 months alone, Visa has issued more than 680 million tokens, and we’re excited to be expanding our capabilities even further so we can secure even more types of digital transactions – even those without a 16-digit Visa credential.”