Payment security that unlocks innovation

How cloud tokenization granted a software company the freedom to innovate with peace of mind

About the company

Xplor Technologies empowers “everyday life” businesses with cloud-based verticalized software, embedded payments, and a suite of commerce-accelerating technologies designed to help them grow and succeed. The company supports over 78,000 businesses of all sizes across the globe, including childcare centers, fitness studios, gyms and recreation centers, maintenance, HVAC, lawn care, cleaning businesses, and dry cleaners.

Xplor Technologies was formed in 2021 from the merger of Clearent, a U.S. full-service payment solutions provider, and Transaction Services Group (TSG), a provider of software and integrated payments for the subscription economy. Over the past few years, the company has grown quickly through a series of acquisitions, and new customer wins. This growth has created a large payments database needing constant security monitoring and maintenance.

Industry: Technology

Location: North America, Australasia, Europe, and the U.K.

Company Size: Commercial

Products Used: Transparent Gateway, Vaulted and Vaultless Tokens

Increased payment security

When designing security for a modern payments platform, Xplor Technologies Chief Security Officer Kevin Kanji knew that “every account number held on our platform could pose a security risk.”


Maintaining a large database of over 7 million payment account numbers, and growing, was a security challenge for Kanji, who devotes considerable time and energy to safeguarding the company’s sensitive data. “We provide software and payments solutions to customers in 140 countries, so the work involved in maintaining the security of our systems is vast,” Kanji said, “Payment security and compliance is essential for maintaining trust with our customers, reducing the risk of a breach, and increasing our overall efficiency.”


Xplor Technologies knows that tokenization is essential to minimizing risk. “There’s little value in holding payment information directly,” said Kanji. Now, using TokenEx, sensitive data is swapped for placeholder tokens.


With tokenization, Xplor Technologies no longer needs to secure and manage its payment data internally. Even in the case of a suspected breach, its sensitive data remains securely stored elsewhere. “It’s about risk tolerance and peace of mind,” Kanji explained, “Tokenization reduces the risk, so I can focus on all the other security issues that need attention.”

Reduced effort

Managing a complex internal payment database isn’t the only thing that needs enormous effort from Kanji and his team. Maintaining PCI DSS compliance, the payment card industry data security standards for keeping cardholder data secure, is an additional, constant responsibility. “At the moment, managing multiple PCI DSS audits takes up a lot of my team’s time,” said Kanji, “With responsibility for maintaining security architecture, risk, and compliance, along with cyber defense and response, I’m always looking for the most efficient ways for my team to operate effectively.”

Tokenization has not only reduced the risk to the Xplor Technologies internal payment database, but also reduced the time and effort the team needs to spend on maintaining overall payment security and compliance.

With this reclaimed bandwidth, Kanji is focusing more of the security team’s energy towards Xplor Technologies’ products, “I want to make sure the security of our software is an asset that customers trust and value as much as they do functionality. So that they look at our products and say, wow, the security team is directly involved in how they’re building their software. I trust that, and I want to use it.”

How it works

Xplor uses a combination of vaulted and vaultless tokens to secure its payment information. Vaulted tokens eliminate the risk of storing sensitive data by sending the data to TokenEx to pseudonymize, tokenize, and store on their behalf. And vaultless tokens are used to rapidly generate tokens for Xplor Technologies, enabling payment transactions to be processed securely for customers without needing to create a storage database for these transactions.

Xplor Technologies customers benefit from smoother, more secure payments while Xplor Technologies reduces the impact of meeting PCI DSS compliance requirements as well as protecting itself from the negative impact of a data breach.

Xplor Technologies can also now capture and send sensitive payment information through the TokenEx Transparent Gateway, which securely transfers information between third-party APIs. This system increases the security of Xplor Technologies data while neatly transferring maintenance and compliance efforts to the data security experts at TokenEx.

Reduced risk & unlocked opportunities

Xplor reduced its operational security efforts by eliminating the need to manage a payment database.

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Xplor minimized its PCI DSS scope by removing the storage and use of payment data from its internal systems.

Xplor increased data security by replacing sensitive data with tokens that would be useless to criminals if stolen.

“I don’t want a payment vault sitting in our infrastructure needing a ton of security controls around it. Working with tokenization partners like TokenEx allows us to reduce the level of effort spent on infrastructure and security, by automating as much of that as possible.”
Kevin Kanji

Chief Security Officer, Xplor Technologies

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