Visa this week announced its Token service, and while it seems Apple has an exclusive on the technology until the end of 2014, Droid Life is reporting that the service will come to Android in 2015.
Token generates random numbers that aren’t related to your actual credit card number, and uses those numbers to make payments. It’s the technology powering Apple Pay service, and is designed to keep your credit card details safe on your phone, never to be transmitted – retailers never actually get to see your real credit card number, so in the case of a security breach you won’t need to get your card reissued by your bank. In many ways, it seems that Token is the way online payments should be made.
The official Visa Token site specifically calls out making mobile payments with Apple Pay and Android devices, and indicates that a full set of APIs and an SDK is on offer for financial institutions, merchants and “value-added partners”. It doesn’t seem you’ll see a Visa Token app per se, but rather a mobile payments app from your own financial institution that supports it – you might not even know it.
What remains to be seen is the speed with which Visa will deploy Token worldwide (the service is US-only for now), and what the uptake from local partners will be. We’ve already seen Cuscal start to roll out Redi2Pay, an NFC-HCE solution for its partner institutions. Cuscal told us earlier in the year that it was working with Visa in developing the mobile payments solution, so it’s possible that Redi2Pay will be Token-ready when Visa’s ready to go global with its service.
We’ve been writing about them for a while – are you in the market for a mobile payment solution. Could a service using Visa Token be it? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
Yes mine is working, coles everywhere. How many times have you tried it ?
Multiple times now. Had Issues when first announced but gave up. Have tried again a few times the past week when the situation of a fail is less embarrassing. Tried at work , but they had the offline terminal setup only uploading at midnight – but Coles supprised me. Anyway – Not long been off the phone with Westpac, all settings etc are correct, Coles is acceptable (interestingly JBHIFI is holding out … ) but we decided to wipe the app cache and card registration and start from the beginning.
How does this differ from the current Westpacs Galaxy S5 payments?
I so far have been unsuccessful with Wetpacs offering with “Client Unavailable” at Coles. Has anyone got it working? amd where?
From the article:
“Token generates random numbers that aren’t related to your actual credit card number, and uses thosenumbers to make payments. It’s the technology powering Apple Pay service, and is designed to keep your credit card details safe on your phone, never to be transmitted – retailers never actually get to see your real credit card number, so in the case of a security breach you won’t need to get your card reissued by your bank. In many ways, it seems that Token is the way online payments should be made.”
Still not getting the token thing. The token has to be linked to your card number somewhere so as such is still vulnerable. I get it is a one shot token but yeah there is still a communication link. Moving forward, if tokens are the way to go then a card number in general would/should become redundant and the token might as well just link to your account name/number. I see it thata token generation would also require an active network connection to link thentwo and authenticate the token with the card and the bank which could present problems, I… Read more »
The link between token and credit card number is held by the bank and never passed onto merchants.
While it’s possible for a merchant to get hacked quite easily, it would be a massive shock to hear of a bank being hacked for such information.
It would also need to be done in real time, as once the token has been validated it is destroyed.