Mastercard, being engaged by CRED, a platform for individuals, brands and institutions, announced the launch of Card-on-File tokenisation services on the app using Mastercard’s tokenisation platform MDES for Merchants (M4M). MDES for merchants is a gamechanger for retailers, enabling a smooth and secure shopping experience, while future-proofing their business. It ensures that a cardholder’s payment data is safely stored and maintained by replacing card numbers with an encrypted digital token. These digital tokens are unique to each consumer-to-business relationship and ensure that the card data is not exposed in the transaction value chain. Hence, these details cannot be intercepted or stolen.
The latest guidelines on card-tokenisation services, issued by The Reserve Bank of India in September 2021, are an extension of the tokenisation framework to support merchants and payment aggregators. It converts saved cards in the ecosystem into tokens with an explicit consent from the customer. With an aim to make card-based digital payments more secure and frictionless for transactions on mobile phones, tablets, laptops/desktops, wearables, IoT devices etc, this service also significantly increases convenience for consumers and creates efficiencies for merchants. This process will reduce the risk to a minimum for card payments.
“With an increase in the number of consumers making payments and purchases online, there is a need to build trust in digital transactions. Tokenisation is an important step towards ensuring convenient and secure digital payments and we are glad to be working with ecosystem partners like Mastercard to educate members on the benefits of this move, while enabling them to tokenise their cards in a convenient manner,” said Kunal Shah, Founder, CRED.
“Online shopping and digital payments become essential in people’s daily lives. The new tokenisation framework safeguards card-based digital payments while offering consumers a convenient way to pay, as they do not need to enter card details every time they pay on a digital platform. CRED is Mastercard’s first customer to adopt this service in India. To ensure a safe and seamless payment experience, CRED will also offer other Mastercard services such as Identity Check Express and SEND for card bill payments,” said Vikas Varma, Chief Operating Officer, South Asia, Mastercard.
