Visa has now issued more than 2 billion network tokens worldwide. „We doubled the number in just 10 months.”

an article written by Jack Forestell, Chief Product Officer at Visa

„When it comes to money, buzzwords frequently catch fire within the mainstream: crypto, Tap to Pay, and ‘buy now, pay later.’ While these are good examples of solutions that have broken through to many, tokenization still remains an outlier, despite how many people are benefitting from this security technology without even realizing it.

Digitization has been on an inexorable upward trajectory, especially over the last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic—and there’s no going back. The fast pace of our collective shift to digital commerce continues to astonish, with worldwide retail e-commerce sales growing 27.6% in 2020, for a total of $4.280 trillion, according to the eMarketer Global E-commerce Update 2021.

Today, I’m proud to share that Visa has now issued more than 2 billion network tokens worldwide through Visa Token Service. It took nearly six years to reach 1 billion network tokens and now we’ve more than doubled the number of tokens we’ve issued, taking us past 2 billion in just 10 months.

Alongside the hundreds of Visa employees focused on tokenization, I’m energized to be a part of this impactful milestone and transformation from tokenization’s start as a single product to it now being one of the largest payments security platforms in the market.”

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Tokenization is a simple, yet powerful concept: Replace sensitive data with tokens to make digital payments more secure. 

Tokenization replaces a cardholder’s 16-digit Visa account number with a secure “token” that protects the underlying card number from fraudsters—and is used by more than 615,000 merchants to power digital commerce across 193+ markets.