André Stoorvogel, Head of Marketing, Rambus Bell ID

Banks around the world are working to develop, launch or expand the mobile payments services they offer to their customers. Many issuers already support the ‘OEM Pays’ – Apple Pay, Android Pay and SamsungPay – and many more will seek to as they roll-out into other countries.

As part of this process, banks work closely with the payment schemes to integrate with their tokenization services. The schemes manage tokenization on behalf of the OEM Pays and allow banks to connect to these mobile payment services.

Payment tokenization replaces traditional primary account numbers (PAN) with unique payment tokens that can only be used in certain circumstances. For example, a token might only be usable when making a payment with a specific device (such as a smartphone) or when paying for goods or services at a specific merchant. The technology has been introduced to protect transaction data and mitigate fraud.

Token service providers are entities in the payments ecosystem that are responsible for the generation, storage, de-tokenization and lifecycle management of tokens.

There are now millions of digital cards and payment tokens deployed into the OEM Pay wallets.

The challenge

As the mobile payments ecosystem expands, managing tokenization activity is becoming increasingly complex and time-consuming.

Banks are seeing themselves integrate with an increasing number of third parties. Across a bank’s portfolio of accounts, it might issue cards across multiple payment schemes and issue digital cards to a range of OEM Pay wallets.

This requires connections with a number of the payment schemes’ tokenization services, each with their own individual requirements, specifications and interfaces.

In parallel, banks need to manage ongoing projects to update their systems in line with the regular specification updates from the global technical body and the payment schemes. This requires a great deal of time, investment and expertise.

With these individual connections to third parties, we are seeing a fragmented internal tokenization system develop that does not allow banks to gain an overall view of tokenization activity.

Banks therefore need a solution that not only simplifies the increasing complexity of their current tokenization activity, but that can also be adapted and expanded to meet future tokenization requirements as this relatively new ecosystem develops.

The solution

Banks can look to Rambus Bell ID’s Token Gateway to overcome all of these challenges. Banks can now manage tokenization activity for the ‘OEM Pay’ mobile wallets through a single software platform. This significantly simplifies and consolidates integration with the multiple token service providers (TSPs) operated by third-parties, like international and domestic payment schemes.

Rambus Bell ID constantly aligns Token Gateway with the latest requirements from the credit and debit schemes. This avoids the complex and time consuming process of monitoring for specification updates from the schemes and manually managing the update process to their systems. This makes the lifecycle management of tokenization significantly easier and cheaper.

Issuers also have the ability to tailor the solution to their specific needs. In addition to a lifecycle management module, which is fundamental to the platform, banks can choose from various optional modules. For example, a card asset module allows the personalization and branding of digital cards, and a token vault mirror is available to maintain a log of tokenized data in-house, allowing banks to check a transaction without having to contact the relevant scheme TSP. And as the banks’ needs evolve, the system can be altered and expanded at any time.