As it rebuilds its core payment infrastructure to accommodate real-time payments, The Clearing House has entered an arrangement with Mastercard to enable banks to supply and manage tokens for securing mobile payments, remote purchases and Internet-of-things (IoT) transactions.
The Clearing House says it will launch its card tokenisation sservice in the next quarter, and extend it to other networks it manages, including Real-Time Payments (RTP).
Tokenization, which replaces a physical card number with a unique alternate number or 'token', works behind the scenes and requires little change in how customers and merchants operate.
Sherri Haymond, executive vice president, Digital Partnerships at Mastercard says the agreement builds on Mastercard’s desire to support a robust token ecosystem and enable issuer optionality for services: “Through this partnership, banks that issue Mastercard-branded cards now have the choice to tokenize their customers’ accounts through TCH, providing their customers digital payments options that offer the same safety, security, rights and benefits as accounts tokenized by Mastercard.”