How can Banks Simplify Tokenization?

André Stoorvogel, Head of Marketing, Rambus Bell ID

Banks around the world are working to develop, launch or expand the mobile payments services they offer to their customers. Many issuers already support the ‘OEM Pays’ – Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay – and many more will seek to as they roll-out into other countries.

As part of this process, banks work closely with the payment schemes to integrate with their tokenization services. The schemes manage tokenization on behalf of the OEM Pays and allow banks to connect to these mobile payment services.

There are now millions of digital cards and payment tokens deployed into the OEM Pay wallets.

The challenge

As the mobile payments ecosystem expands, managing tokenization activity is becoming increasingly complex and time-consuming.

Banks are seeing themselves integrate with an increasing number of third parties. Across a bank’s portfolio of accounts, it might issue cards across multiple payment schemes and issue digital cards to a range of OEM Pay wallets.

This requires connections with a number of the payment schemes’ tokenization services, each with their own individual requirements, specifications and interfaces.

In parallel, banks need to manage ongoing projects to update their systems in line with the regular specification updates from the global technical body and the payment schemes. This requires a great deal of time, investment and expertise.

With these individual connections to third parties, we are seeing a fragmented internal tokenization system develop that does not allow banks to gain an overall view of tokenization activity.

Banks therefore need a solution that not only simplifies the increasing complexity of their current tokenization activity, but that can also be adapted and expanded to meet future tokenization requirements as this relatively new ecosystem develops.

The solution

Banks can look to Rambus Bell ID’s Token Gateway to overcome all of these challenges. Banks can now manage tokenization activity for the ‘OEM Pay’ mobile wallets through a single software platform. This significantly simplifies and consolidates integration with the multiple token service providers (TSPs) operated by third-parties, like international and domestic payment schemes.