How Reliable Tokenization Fixed an Expensive Payment Problem

Trust My Travel realized they had a problem with their tokenization provider in 2020 when over $100,000 worth of transactions were authorized, but not captured. The vigilant Trust My Travel team caught the issue and was able to capture most of the transactions manually, but the mistake still cost the company close to $10,000. Their tokenization provider brushed off the incident. 

“Months later, same effect, same losses, same refusal to accept any responsibility.” Matt Bush, Chief Technology Officer, and Co-Founder of Trust My Travel, recounted, “Obviously there’s the cost to the company, the cost of manpower from having to run things manually and trying to figure out which transactions succeeded, and which failed, and the loss of faith from customers.”  

Trust My Travel knew they needed a different tokenization solution if they wanted to stop losing revenue. Thankfully, they found TokenEx. Matt Bush explained, “Without using TokenEx, we would either have something that was completely wedded to a payment gateway, or we would have had to build in a sort of spiraling code base to keep adding in more and more libraries since each gateway has its own way of doing things and its own way of tokenizing cards.”   

TokenEx provided a simple and reliable source of tokenization and soon Trust My Travel’s payments ran smoothly. Instead of costing Trust My Travel hours of stressful labor and thousands of dollars, TokenEx now saves the Trust My Travel team time and energy. 

“We’ve vaulted about half a million cards via the transparent gateway,” Matt Bush said, “And those cards have generated about $560 million worth of transactions.” Matt went on to explain that close to 150,000 of those cards were vaulted with TokenEx Batch. This meant that Trust My Travel didn’t have to ask thousands of customers to reenter their cardholder data. Because of the unlikelihood of a customer reentering their data, Matt Bush was confident that “Trust My Travel would have lost those 150,000 cards [without TokenEx Batch].” 

Trust My Travel initially used the TokenEx Batch tool to upload close to 150,000 cards. Now, they use the TokenEx iFrame to tokenize incoming cardholder data and run transactions through the Transparent Gateway. This use of tokenization means that sensitive cardholder data is secured by TokenEx at the moment of capture and swapped for tokens before it continues in the payment journey. This keeps cardholder data out of Trust My Travel’s internal systems, allows them to connect to multiple payment gateways, and drastically reduces their PCI scope.

“We’ve been using TokenEx for about three years.” Matt Bush explained, “And in that time, we’ve run approximately 22 million successful transactions via the Transparent Gateway, and around 850,000 of those were thanks to tokens created via the iFrame.”