Scan. Click. Pay. The seamless flow of money is simple. The digital payment is user-friendly to every demographic irrespective of their age, educational background, or technical expertise. But are we truly catching up with the technology that seems to evolve faster than ever before? Is our money safe? Can we trust it? How is our money hopping across wallets, people, and geographic boundaries? Well, here is a little something that can help you understand the whole-new leap into the world of digital payments.

It all begins with Data, which has now become the most coveted asset in the world. From our name and birthdays to the number of minutes we use an app, every little data is collected, mapped, and analyzed. To use digital payments, we readily submit a lot of our personal details. Name, date of birth, phone number, bank details, credit/debit card numbers, permissions to access our contacts, our location and more. The constant flow and syndication of data to and from our phones enables us to stay connected and make our payments faster than ever before. So, let us take a little peek at the behind-the-scenes of how the transaction happens and how our data is protected.

Between the second we click ‘pay’ and the receiver acquires the amount. The money goes for a little journey from your account to the receiver’s account. A lot of invisible pieces work together in tandem to ensure the transaction happens. The first step begins with the payer's consent to pay, followed by a payment request from the receiver. Which connects the receiver’s bank with the corresponding payment gateway. Then, there is another request to authenticate the transaction which is an OTP verification. The payment gateway now proceeds to settle the amount with the receiver’s bank. End of transaction.

The seamless flow of data within these invisible digital touch points in the form of requests, authentication/verification, and actual transaction. Our personal data goes for a real spinner with banks, payment gateways, websites and many more entities trying to access (& sometimes store) and provide us with ease of payment. As long as it stays within the system in an encrypted format, the data should not be misused. Alas! We live in a world with hackers and dark net working to get their hands on our hard-earned money. Hence, the pressing need to always be safe and cautious. This is where the invisible trinket called tokens play a significant role.

The valuable data that is accessed, shared, and stored to enable the seamless digital transaction is replaced with tokens. These tokens are randomly generated and have no value. All the sensitive information or Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is stored and transacted in the form of tokens. If these tokens are stolen, intercepted, or leaked, they have no useful information. Tokens do not contain any “real” data but merely serve as a reference point to the actual data, which is safely stored in a secure vault. By using tokens in the place of sensitive data, companies ensure data security and essentially mitigate the risk of data breach, data loss, misconfigured cloud resources, computer hacking, and more.

Do not forget there is an Achilles heel to this impervious process. Tokens can only be
“de-tokenized” or mapped back to the original sensitive data via the original tokenization platform. So, a data breach in the original Tokenization platform could be a potential downside to the system although it far outweighs shuttling sensitive information between portals or using encrypted data which contains the original data that is masked using an encryption algorithm, which can be compromised if a hacker effectively figures out a way to solve the algorithm. Although encryption was a popular and preferred mode of ensuring data security.

Tokenization is slowly but surely catching up, as companies find it more agreeable to fortify one weak spot rather than spend exhaustive number of resources in defending several vulnerable points. Well, now find out which of the payment gateways use tokenization to ensure your data security. Learn more about the security features offered by Pay10 to fortify your customers money and data with the convenience of an agnostic platform.