Masking Stored Credit Card Data
Storing customer credit and debit card numbers “in the clear” opens merchants and enterprises up to huge potential for hacking and fraud. However, to enable recurring and subscription payments, it is extremely valuable to have this data readily available in the processing system.
Tokenization is a best practice security for all merchants that replaces credit, debit and ACH information in a transaction with a random character string or “token.” Bluefin’s secure payment tokenization solutions allow merchants and enterprises to perform authorizations, reissues, refunds, returns, voids, chargebacks and recurring billing without the need to ever store the card number, significantly minimizing the merchant’s PCI footprint.
Additionally, Bluefin also offers Store & Convert, which is a custom conversion process that tokenizes large volumes of existing card numbers on a system in one step. This is an ideal solution for any company looking to implement a tokenization solution with legacy card numbers that are in the clear.
Tokenization – Key to Holistic Payment Security
Tokenization is an integral payment technology for every merchant, along with EMV and PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE). Each of these solutions plays an important role in holistic payment security:
- EMV, also called “Chip and PIN” authenticates the credit or debit card at the point of sale by reading a chip embedded on the card and validating the cardholder with a PIN or their signature. EMV makes it extremely difficult (though not impossible) to “white-label” or duplicate a physical credit card that could then be used by thieves to purchase items at the POS.
- PCI-validated P2PE protects data in transit by encrypting cardholder data upon point of entry in the retail device. Encrypting card data upon entry prevents the data from being available in the enterprise or merchant’s system as “clear-text” where it could be exposed in the event of a data breach.
- Tokenization enables merchants and enterprises to safely “store” cardholder data at rest for use in future transactions. Tokenization, like P2PE, effectively renders the data useless to hackers.
Tokenization is a standard security offering available via our PayConex Platform, our QuickSwipe mobile product and our PayConex for Salesforce offering.
