VISA has announced that it will be introducing a new payment “tokenization” service in Europe designed to help facilitate mobile payment solutions.
Intended to be available for European financial institutions to take advantage of as early as April, the new service will replace traditional plastic credit card numbers with unique one-time tokens that can be used to authorize payments without needing to expose account information.
This form of one-time “tokenization” is a key component of the security behind Apple Pay, and while the VISA announcement simply mentions mobile devices and contactless payments in general terms, it seems likely that this development is intended to at least indirectly provide support for a future rollout of Apple Pay within the European Union.