And how to know which approach is right for you
With the rising rates of credit card fraud and cybercrimes, many companies are trying to increase the security of payments. A growing solution to increase payment security is tokenization. Here are five key things you should know about tokenization:
- Why Tokenization? Tokenization helps minimize risk and cost. According to the Ponemon Institute, there is a 20% chance that a merchant will experience a data breach within the next two years. To prevent this, merchants must follow the PCI DSS guidelines to protect cardholder information. Tokenization meets these standards when it is provided by a PCI-compliant vendor.
- How does it work? Tokenization replaces every credit card number stored in enterprise systems with a series of randomly-generated codes that are of no value to hackers. Therefore, when a hacker breaches a payment database and attempts to steal payment information, the merchant and its customers’ information is still secure.
- Which type of Tokenization is right for me? There are three types of tokenization: On-premise, Hosted and Cloud. To determine which type is right for you, consider your location, costs, PCI DSS audit scope responsibility, scalability, redundancy measures, backup and recovery methods.
- Other selection considerations? Select a solution with an eye to the future.
- Choose a processor-agnostic tokenization solution to manage future growth
- Select multi-use instead of single-use tokenization which enables more streamlined reporting and easier customer service
- Use the same form of tokenization in both QA and production
- Choose a vendor offering proprietary tokenization technology
- How do I make the most of tokenization? Cover all your bases in the solution design phase.
- Identify risk workflows
- Convert sensitive raw or encrypted data to tokens and then purge the original data to reduce risk
- Block your users from viewing de-tokenized card numbers
- Train your representatives to not enter raw card numbers in text fields
- Prevent the storage of CVV values
By deploying tokenization, you can minimize the risk of a data breach and minimize the scope of a PCI audit. To learn more, read Paymetric’s eBook on the benefits of tokenization.
