Payment tokenisation: keeping transactions secure in modern eCommerce

eCommerce has unleashed a world of almost unlimited choice. Now, consumers can shop with a host of different merchants online, with the incentive that their purchases will be fast, secure, and easy to follow. 

This level of speed and security can be attributed to the growing customer demand for instant and varied payment options and the infrastructure fintechs and merchants are building around global eCommerce and payment tokenisation. 

In this Virtual Arena, we explore the dynamic relationship between retailers and financial services providers and the increasingly interconnected ecosystem that holds modern eCommerce together. For this discussion, we are joined by some of the industry’s strongest payments and infrastructure builders; Alex Gatiragas, the Global Head of Digital Solution Experience at Giesecke+Devrient, Kurt Schmid, the Marketing & Innovation Director of Secure Digital Payments at Netcetera, and Alex Page, the VP of Solution Consulting at FIS. We interrogate the use cases for payment tokenisation in online payments and how security is insured in an industry where daily transactions are in the tens of millions. 

“One of the areas that issuers are looking at right now is the self-service of tokens and provisioning of tokens into merchants. So a particular user journey could be; they apply for an account, they get their debit card, they put it in their favourite wallet, and they are also given the opportunity to put into their favourite merchant as well, which saves the double handling of having to go to the merchant and change your card details,” said Gatigaras. 

We are going to see an increase in network tokenization. The merchant, on their part, has cottoned on to the fact that the key differentiator for online shopping is the simplicity of the payment journey. Today, all customer behaviour can be boiled down to one prerequisite: convenience.