Mastercard has announced its vision for 100% e-commerce tokenization in Europe by the end of the decade.
The move supports a global commitment to phase out manual card entry, making e-commerce safer and more accessible. As payments become more intricate, the firms said it is leveraging tokenization, streamlined guest checkout and payment passkeys to create a consistent experience across devices, browsers, and operating systems.
Contactless payments have made in-person payments seamless and ubiquitous while advocates of toeknization believe there’s now an opportunity to bring that same experience to online checkout. Despite rigorous security solutions put in place by the payments industry, online commerce continues to face vulnerabilities due to bad actors. According to Juniper Research, losses from online payment fraud is forecasted to exceed $91 billion by 2028.
Under the vision, tokenization will continue to replace the 16–19-digit number on the payment card with a secure token to help reduce fraud and improve approval rates. To eliminate manual card entry, Mastercard said it is making it easier to embed Click to Pay into merchant sites while enabling bank partners to help people enroll their cards. Finally, payment passkeys are leveraging online mobile device-based biometric authentication to eliminate passwords and one-time codes.
Introduced in 2014, Mastercard’s tokenization service today reporteldy secures 25% of all e-commerce transactions globally, with adoption accelerating 50% year-over-year.
Valerie Nowak, Executive Vice President, Product & Innovation at Mastercard Europe said: “In Europe we have seen tokenization gaining momentum across the ecosystem, the convenience and reduced rates of fraud sell themselves. We are confident that reaching this vision by 2030 is a win-win-win for shoppers, retailers and the card issuers alike.”
