The Canadian-based Interac Association/Acxsys Corporation (“Interac”) recently introduced its Token Service Provider (TSP) service.
TSP – developed in collaboration with IBM, Bell ID and Everlink – can perhaps best be described as a proprietary token generation and management service that allows financial institutions, merchants and partners to build and manage secure digital payment transactions.
“The development of the Interac Token Service Provider (TSP) means that mobile debit payments in Canada will get even more secure,” Gini Lindsay, the VP of Customer & Business Development at Bell ID, explained. “[TSP] enables Interac to support the Canadian market with secure tokenization services.”
The Interac TSP is also capable of supporting a wide array of mobile payment deployment options. This flexibility enables Interac to adapt to the market’s constantly changing dynamics, while offering the latest payment security services to its customers on a long-term basis.
“The role of the token service provider (TSP) has come to the fore to manage the tokenization process, including hosting the secure token vault, and ensure customers’ and banks’ sensitive data is kept secure,” said Lindsay. “When deploying tokenization technology to integrate with the various mobile payments platforms, banks have a number of options. They can choose to become their own TSP and take control of their own tokenization activity.”
As Lindsay confirms, this process can also be hosted with a trusted third party, while still maintaining control of the implementation and sensitive data. Alternatively, tokenization can be completely outsourced to the payments schemes.
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, tokenization reduces the value of stored payment credentials by replacing them with a randomly generated number that resembles the customer’s primary account number (PAN). Essentially, this means tokenized data is worthless if obtained by fraudsters, as it simply acts as a reference for a consumer’s original card data – which only the card networks and/or the consumer’s bank can map back to the original account.
Interested in learning more? You can check out the official Interac press release here or download our Token Service Provider brochure.
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