NFC TIMES Exclusive – Mastercard has opened up tokenization of Mastercard-branded card accounts to two other major payments industry players, First Data and PayPal, enabling them to tokenize Mastercard-branded cards for mobile and other digital payments services as an alternative to Mastercard’s own token service, MDES, NFC Times has learned.
The quiet certifications by Mastercard of the big U.S. acquirer and processor First Data, and internet-payments giant PayPal as token service providers, or TSPs, follows the announcement in October that Mastercard had certified the TSP of The Clearing House, an association of 25 major banks in the U.S. NFC Times last month reported that First Data was also planning to tokenize Mastercard-branded cards.
But it was not clear then that Mastercard had already certified First Data as a token service provider of Mastercard-branded card accounts. Mastercard at the time would say only that it had certified the TSPs of two other organizations in addition to The Clearing House, declining to name them. A Mastercard spokesman did not respond to a request this week for additional information on the certifications of First Data and PayPal, which have not been announced.
