Secure and desensitize cardholder data using the TokenEx Cloud Security Platform
Throughout the payments space, credit card information changes hands millions of times each day. Each of these transactions requires cardholder data and additional payment information to complete—sensitive credit card information that must be secured in order to protect customers, merchants, and banks. To safeguard this sensitive data and comply with regulatory obligations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, TokenEx's Cloud Security Platform utilizes cloud-based tokenization. By tokenizing with TokenEx, you can secure and desensitize cardholder data in compliance with the PCI DSS while virtually eliminating the risk of data theft.
Credit card tokenization is a method for deidentifying cardholder data via the tokenization process.
Similar to encryption, tokenization works by obfuscating the original data to render it unreadable in the event of a breach or other exposure. Unlike encryption, however, tokenization is irreversible, and tokenized credit card data can be stored inside an organization's cardholder data environment without violating the PCI DSS. It also can be deployed in a format- and length-preserving fashion to retain much of the business utility of the original, sensitive cardholder data. This enables organizations to operate with minimal disruptions to their existing business processes.
TokenEx uses randomly generated data called tokens to tokenize a credit card, meaning the original, sensitive credit card data is removed from your environment and safely stored outside of it while nonsensitive data is returned to you as a placeholder token for the credit card number. By swapping the credit card data, most commonly the primary account number (PAN), with a token, you’re relieving yourself of the need to store customer credit cards in your internal systems. From there, you can send credit card data to any endpoint via our patented, processor-agnostic Transparent Gateway.
Credit card tokenization works with a variety of acceptance channels. From point-to-point encryption (P2PE) integrations for point-of-sale devices to call center solutions and mobile applications, TokenEx offers omnichannel credit card tokenization. Here are some of the ways our platform can provide tokenization for credit card transactions.
Security and risk reduction are tokenization's primary aim, but the compliance benefit of using tokenization to reduce controls and remove sensitive data from scope can be just as valuable. By replacing sensitive cardholder data with an irreversible token, tokenization effectively removes sensitive data from a cardholder data environment. Because tokens are considered nonsensitive data, they can be stored and used for internal business purposes without bringing the system that stores them into scope.
In some instances, this level of scope reduction can be so great that an ecommerce web store, for example, can potentially use TokenEx's Cloud Security Platform to reduce its compliance obligations to a SAQ-A. The SAQ-A is a self-assessment covering only requirements 9 and 12 of the PCI DSS, which entail restricting physical cardholder access to sensitive data and maintaining an information security policy, respectively. This means an organization would outsource all of its other PCI DSS requirements and be responsible solely for requirements 9 and 12, resulting in significant savings in terms of overhead and operations.
Integrate with any payment processor or third party thanks to TokenEx's processor-agnostic Cloud Security Platform.
Reduce your PCI compliance scope by deploying tokenization to remove sensitive credit card data from your environment.
Leverage the freedom to tokenize, store, and securely transfer credit card data without sacrificing compliance or business utility and agility.
