Tokenization Moves Beyond Payments to Personal Privacy
11-June-24
In 2014, Visa introduced its tokenization service, allowing customers to pay for goods and services without giving away their credit card details. The company has issued more than 10 billion tokens, which typically replace a card number in a digital wallet, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay. The next great push for tokenization will be to improve privacy and data quality. Unlike encryption, tokens can directly replace sensitive data, adhering to the data format so that legacy systems can store the data. Vaulted systems store the mapping of tokens to data in a vault but allow employees to use the tokenized version, while vaultless systems use an encryption-like mapping that can restore data for authorized users. Vaultless tokenization provides the easiest way to secure an organization’s data as most of the organization’s systems will never see the original data strings, and only a very few, limited, heavily controlled systems are allowed to transform tokens back to sensitive data.
