Visa Prepares #Tokenisation, #mPOS Services for Nigeria

Visa Cards has announced its plan to launch tokenisation and mPOS services customized for the needs of the Nigerian market.

Tokenisation technology, Nigeria Communication gathered, will be at the heart of new mobile payment solutions and will become one of the best data protection and fraud prevention methods available.

The new service already available for financial institutions in Europe from mid-April 2015, is part of Visa’s developed service to meet an increasing demand from consumers to use their latest smartphones and wearable devices for payments.

Speaking at #VisaTechFeed, a Visa Card-Bloggers meeting, Mr. Ade Ashaye, country manager, West Africa, Visa Cards, said that working with Visa Cards, financial institutions in Nigeria and West African region in general, will be able to respond to the rapidly changing environment, providing their customers with more convenient and secured payment models in a cost-effective way.

The tokenisation service protects customer data, substituting the payment account information found on a plastic card with a series of numbers that can be used to authorise payment, mainly online, without exposing actual account details.

He said, “Your money matters to us. That's why we keep finding ways to secure your Visa card from fraudsters. So, Tokenization is an upcoming technology that protects your Visa card number when shopping online.

He said that Tokenization, mPOS and more convenient and protected payment technologies will soon be unveiled in Nigeria.

Tokenization in particular supports the continuing fight against fraud, allowing financial institutions to control the environments where the token can be use.

For example, a token set up only for contactless payments cannot be used to make an on-line purchase. Additionally, if a mobile device is lost or stolen, a token can be easily and promptly disabled.

“Challenges some of our Nigerian customers face include some merchants not trusting the country but we are overcoming this,” Ashaye added.

Speaking on VisaNet, he said that for nearly 60 years, VisaNet has provided the technology backbone to support Visa's payment innovations and services.

Today, “VisaNet” centralized and integrated architecture enables Visa clients with secure, reliable and scalable payment processing and value-added services.

It connects more than 2.3 billion accounts, over 38 million acceptance locations, 2.3 million ATMs and nearly 15,000 financial institutions in 200 countries around the globe, making VisaNet the world's largest retail payments network.

“Every time, every way, everyone, everywhere, VisaNet puts payment technology into more people's hands,” he boasted.

He also highlighted “Visa Checkout” as a digital payment service designed to simplify the checkout experience using a secure, single sign-on across channels and devices using a customer's preferred payment method.

Visa Checkout uses multiple layers of security, including fraud-monitoring systems and encrypted tokens using SHA256 hash algorithms to help keep payment information safe; accepts any major credit or debit card so customers can check-out easily and securely using the payment method they use today on one’s site and integrating Visa Checkout is easy and requires only a few simple HTML and JavaScript tags.

As a premier payments technology company, Visa’s global network connects thousands of financial institutions with millions of merchants and cardholders every day.