NFC Times Exclusive Insight – EMVCo, the commercial standards organization owned by the world’s largest payment networks, has promised to have its registration process for token service providers ready by the end of the year. Until then, even EMVCo acknowledges that it is more difficult for third-party suppliers to offer tokenization under its specifications–a market that the major payments networks that own EMVCo now dominate in the early going.
UPDATED: It means that vendors and other third party token service providers, or TSPs, would not be able to operate their own token vaults or provide tokenization say some observers–at least not using the EMVCo specifications. Others say that they can operate a TSP but when payment tokenization becomes commonplace in mobile commerce, there would be problems without a centralized registry. Some vendors are saying they already provide EMVCo-specified tokenization to customers. END UPDATE.
The planned TSP registration program is considered overdue, and is something banks and other companies affected by EMVCo’s tokenization specifications have been pressing for.
