If you’re new to taking online card payments through your e-commerce website, or you’re looking to incorporate account management and one-click purchases into your existing web store, then you are going to encounter terms such as Encryption and Tokenisation when it comes to storing customers’ card data and ensuring your systems are secure and PCI-DSS Compliant. Tokenisation is vital to helping businesses prevent cyber-attackers from gaining any meaningful data, and protecting both their customers’ confidential details, but also their trust.
SOTpay+ by Gala Technology uses the secure method of Tokenisation to protect your customers’ confidential payment information, but what is Tokenisation, how does it work and why is it important?
To tokenise something means to change it into something else, so in this case, tokenising a customer’s information means that the data, such as card number, expiry date, name and address, is effectively transformed from valuable content into largely useless strings of numbers and letters. Tokenising data means that it can be moved between networks without ever exposing the information in its true form.
As mentioned above, tokenisation is the process of switching out valuable data for apparently random strings of characters, which cannot be deciphered by any unauthorised visitors to a business system. Tokens never contain any sensitive data, but are able to retrieve the data safely, before accessing or transmitting it, and when taken outside of a company’s systems, it is completely useless.
Let’s put it into context for your business.
First, a new customer signs up for an account and makes a purchase on your website by entering their card details.
That card information is then sent to your acquiring bank in the form of a token, before it is sent to the customer’s card issuer for authorisation. Once authorised the customer’s details are stored and matched to their account number and the bank will confirm or reject the transaction based on whether there are funds available. If it all goes smoothly, your systems are then provided with a token that is matched to your customer’s account and they can then make subsequent purchases without needing to enter their card details again.
There are many benefits to using card tokenisation, including reducing the fees incurred by low security measures, reducing the impact of any data breaches, and contributing to vital PCI-DSS Compliance.
By using a secure system such as tokenisation to store your customers’ card data, your merchant account is viewed by acquirers as being at lower risk of fraud-related losses, and therefore benefits from favourable rates.
Because the data contained on your systems is of zero value to any hacker who successfully breaches your network, you protect your customers and your business.
Because the information is tokenised when it is stored, it cannot be deciphered by any employee, and is therefore useless.
PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) Compliance is a contractual obligation of any business which takes card payments, to protect the confidential and sensitive card data of individuals and organisations. By integrating a payment system which is able to tokenise card data, a business will be taking important steps toward their PCI-DSS obligations.
SOTpay+ is a PCI-DSS Level 1 payment gateway that effectively applies tokenisation to card storage so that businesses who accept recurring card payments, or want to offer one-click account purchases through their e-commerce site or m-commerce app, can do so whilst massively reducing the risk of costly and damaging successful fraud attempts.
Approved by Visa and Mastercard, the SOTpay+ payment gateway is a superior payment processing solution that can be integrated with many different Shopping Cart software, and with Gala Technology’s extensive network of payment industry partners, any business can painlessly switch payment acquirers without losing the premium functions and benefits afforded by SOTpay+.
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