Online payment service provider eMerchantPay recently released details of its new One Time Token (OTT). The token will allow merchants not compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard to collect payment card data on their checkout pages. OTT is a tokenization service, which replaces data with a unique ID that retains essential information without compromising security.
Tokenization works to keep information secure by completely removing any sensitive financial data from merchants’ networks. It retains an encrypted reference to the relevant payment information. The encrypted data is then passed through the tokenization service’s — in this case, eMerchantPay — payment gateway and decrypted, and the necessary data is transferred to the associated bank for processing.
Though tokenization is popular as an alternative to PCI compliance, criticism of the process says that there are too many fragmented services offered. However, that very same fragmentation adds some critical variation that actually enhances each tokenization effort’s security.
The OTT service is currently available for debit and credit card payments. It is not capable of tokenizing alternative payment methods as of yet.
